Odd Lots · Monday, July 20, 2026
Boris Cherney describes a shift in software engineering roles, moving from traditional coding to higher-level functions like prototyping, building, maintaining, scaling, and 'sweeping' (polishing). He argues that as AI becomes capable of writing code, human roles are segmenting into specialized areas that leverage AI assistance.
“I've started to think that the roles are actually segmenting in kind of the opposite way, and I've started to see people kind of split into prototypers. These are people that are amazing at just figuring out like what is that first idea and like very quick iteration into builders, so like once there's a new idea, figuring out how do you actually build this and you know, bring this product to market.”
“Then there's like maintainers, and these are the people that once the software is at scale, they can maintain it. There's something that I call like growers or maybe scalers. These are people that take an idea and you know, this product that exists that has product, market it, and then scale it up so scale it ten x, hunter x and by the way, like these people are very popular anthropic now.”
“And then I think the final role is a sweepers. And it's sort of like I don't know if you guys have a better idea for the name, but I call it a sweeper, janitor or something. It's actually like a very important role. It is about poblishing the product, polishing the infrastructure, polishing the code to get rid of all the rough edges because you know, like as a user, when you use really polished software, you feel it.”