The “Erm, Actually” Engineer is becoming obsolete.

The greatest benefit of A.I. (and Claude Code in particular) is bridging General and Specific Knowledge. This is what will shape the next decade of software development.

“Specific Knowledge” is what you know about the details and specifics of a particular library, particular codebase, particular toolchain, particular development history, etc.

“General Knowledge” is what you know about what should be done. Design patterns, rules of thumb, best practices, architecture patterns, what to avoid and why, etc.

General Knowledge is much more valuable, but it is usually gated or blocked by the need for Specific Knowledge.

I’ve seen many Senior Engineers (with lots of General Knowledge) change jobs and suffer from Impostor Syndrome and panic from feeling ineffective because they feel like they should be contributing more sooner. It’s because they feel the value of their General Knowledge gained through experience, but can’t deploy it until they gain lots of Specific Knowledge about the new particular codebase they’re working on. It’s like breathing through a straw.

Similarly, managers often have deep architectural skill and General Knowledge, but don’t have the time to maintain the Specific Knowledge they need to deploy it personally. So they leave the details to their team members and try to provide what little architectural oversight they have time for.

A.I. is enabling General Knowledge to be deployed without the labor of maintaining the Specific Knowledge which used to be required to deploy it. This is what is really revolutionizing software development!

So my predictions are:

  • If you’ve made a career out of knowing esoteric details of specific libraries, there will be less of place for you. Focus on gaining General Knowledge.
  • If you’re a manager with architectural skill, you should become hands-on once again and will accomplish more than your entire team did.
  • If you manage people, your team will need your help adjusting to the new patterns of Specific and General Knowledge in the age of A.I. tools. If you can help them, you will always have a job.