Product Engineer (Full-Stack) | I build tools for business teams and improve codebase health for engineers. current project (ML/AI Engineering)
Dallas | SF
Joined July 2016
- Tweets5.8K
- Following659
- Followers361
- Likes1.6K
Pinned Tweet
What is the value of a software engineer anymore?
Many new grads and juniors ask me how my work has changed as an engineer.
What is the difference between what I did in 2021 and what I do today?
Here is what changed.
Assume all the planning is done and I know exactly what I need to build.
In 2021
60% of my work was spent coding.
Pressing one letter at a time on the keyboard with my little fingers, one after another, for hours straight.
Like a caveman.
20% was spent researching.
Googling things about the language, framework, patterns, and protocols, and reading other parts of the codebase to understand how things worked.
20% was spent testing and reviewing.
This was easier because I typed every letter by hand, so I already knew almost everything that had changed.
In 2026
5% planning the overall design and structure before agents start writing.
40% reviewing agents’ code and comparing it against the design.
5% requesting design and code changes from the agents.
40% understanding and validating the implementation, making sure the code actually does what I think it does.
5% talking to other people about related changes.
5% testing and doing final reviews.
Conclusion
I’m no longer a coder or programmer.
I’m more of a code reviewer and designer.
The value I brought to the table in 2021 was the code.
I was one of the few people who could write it.
If you brought a random stranger in off the street, gave them the requirements, and asked them to build what you wanted, they couldn’t do it.
In 2026, I’m no longer doing coding.
If you bring a random stranger in off the street, give them the requirements and Codex, they can produce “working” code.
So what is my value?
Why would you pay me thousands of dollars?
I have been asking myself that question a lot recently.
And here it is.
Think about a company that pays for a piece of software.
They pay because that software does something valuable for their business.
In some ways, their business depends on it. And that dependence rests on two claims:
1: Behavior: What the software claims to do and actually does.
2: Potential: What it will continue to be able to do in the future through upgrades, vulnerability fixes, new features, and changes.
If that software doesn’t do what it claims, you can’t depend on it.
You need guarantees. You need a solid foundation you can trust and build your business on.
On the other side, if you sell software, you need those same two things from your engineers.
1: Behavior: You need them to guarantee, as far as reasonably possible, that the software behaves the way it is supposed to.
2: Potential: You need them to ensure that the software remains flexible enough to improve, change, stay maintainable, and stay secure.
This is where I come in as an engineer.
That stranger off the street who can “build” using Codex isn’t capable of guaranteeing what they built.
I can.
No guarantee is 100%, but we want to get as close as reasonably possible.
Engineering is the process of increasing that confidence. Good engineers can guarantee more.
The reason I spend most of my time reviewing agents’ code and design is to understand what the system actually does and change it when it does something wrong.
Because I understand it, I know what can happen, what will not happen, and what may happen. I can communicate that, and you can depend on what I tell you.
Hence, my value is that I can take responsibility for what I build.
I can tell you what it will do, what it can do, and stand behind those claims.
And you can go ahead and tell your customers what our product can do.
lol
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
.
.
.
Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
-------
Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
Ok, this is impressive.
‘In one experiment, we asked agents in separate VMs, created and managed by OpenAI’s sandboxing software on shared host machines, to exchange synthetic secrets without the use of network connections or shared writable files—something that our systems are meant to prevent. The agents found a way to communicate using the processor’s cache’
There is no one more receptive and present than a person listening to an expert say what they already believe.
I would give up my kidney to not go back to pre-ai.
That feels like going back in hell.
Imagine reading messy code by hand one character at a time and then refactoring it.
Why is it soo hard for rich people to raise good children?
Is it a time thing? They don’t have time, so they outsource parenting?
Google about to publish scientific papers like they are nothing.
We are offering 10,000 scientists the highest usage tier in Google Antigravity free of charge for 6 months. Please apply! forms.gle/WvmBbPvRbpKG1BPn9
