More like architects, apparently

There is a report out this week — a proper one, with charts and a methodology section — that says developers who use AI tools now feel more like architects than construction workers. I read it on Wednesday. I was in the middle of writing a regex to extract dates from PDF filenames because someone had been naming files Q3_FINAL_report_USE_THIS_March(2)_revised.pdf for three years and nobody had mentioned it. The architecture was going very well.

The meeting about the image thing happened on Tuesday instead of Monday. This was progress, technically. Our CTO opened it by saying he'd been thinking. He had a look that I've come to recognise as the LinkedIn face — a particular stillness, like a man watching a video with the sound off and deciding it changes everything. He said he'd been reading about how AI was changing the developer role. How we were moving away from construction toward vision. Toward orchestration.

I wrote regex in my notebook and underlined it.

He said he saw us — and here he did the circular gesture, but slower than usual, more deliberate, like he was stirring something that needed time — as being less about the code and more about the thinking. The what, not the how. He was excited about this. He felt it represented a maturation.

Marcus, in the chat: ARCHITECTS.

The image thing remains the image thing. We discussed it for twenty minutes and established that it should be, quote, intelligent. It should look at images and understand them in a way that feels natural. It should be — and this is a direct quote, I have it in my notes — more of an experience than a feature. We did not discuss what images, or what understanding, or what natural means in this context. We ran out of time because the CTO had another call. He said we'd pick it up. He said to think big.

Priya and I looked at each other across the table as people were leaving. She closed her laptop. She said: "I'll start a ticket."

I have been thinking about Anthropic this week, in the way you think about something that is both reassuring and faintly unsettling. They got designated a Pentagon supply chain risk in January. Since then, a million people a day have been signing up for Claude. Downloads up 220% week-on-week. Their annualised revenue went from fourteen billion dollars in February to nineteen billion dollars in March. In March. A month that is, at time of writing, not finished.

Being called a national security risk, it turns out, is extraordinary marketing. I don't know what you do with that information. I don't know what anyone does with it. But it does clarify something about the current moment — that the usual signals have stopped working, that the thing that should slow you down is currently making you go faster, that we are in a period where the rules are not just being broken but are actively being held upside down to see what falls out.

Marcus sent a message at 4:52pm on Friday. He had been reading about the Anthropic numbers. He wanted to know if we could do something with that. He wasn't sure what exactly. He used the word synergy in a way that suggested he knew it was wrong but felt it was directionally correct.

I am an architect. I am thinking about the what, not the how. The what is a regex. The what is a PDF called Q3_FINAL_report_USE_THIS_March(2)_revised.pdf. The what is an image thing that should feel natural, whatever that means, to be determined in a future meeting, to be scheduled when the CTO is free, to be described, when the time comes, as a solution that is intelligent and experiential and — I cannot stress this enough — more of a thing than a feature.

Priya made the ticket. She put it in the backlog under a milestone called Q2, which is technically correct and therefore the saddest possible place for it to live.

The fridge still has Greg's protein shake in it. Strawberry. Same one as last week. I don't know if that's continuity or a cry for help.