In our universe, an organism can only eat something simpler than itself. You consume complexity below you to fuel your rise to the next level. This is how single-celled organisms became us. This is how junior engineers become CTOs. This is how you don't get eaten. I've talked about this in some detail over at my other newsletter in an essay titled Don't Get Eaten.

AI just became a predator. And it's hungry.

The Great Eating

AI is consuming the Computation layer whole. The syntax. The frameworks. The CRUD. The 5 years React, 3 years Node, familiar with AWS zone. Everything junior and mid-level engineers spent years mastering is being digested into commodity.

The stack is relocating. Twice over.

First: from data flow to intelligence flow. For twenty years the sacred question was how does a request get from browser to database and back? That layer is infrastructure now. AI writes your CRUD.

Second: from intelligence flow to agent flow. Agents talking to agents. Your agent herding your customer's agent. Agents. Agents everywhere.

The Hourglass

What survives? Picture an hourglass.

At the top: the AI layer. Fast-moving. LangChain, DSPy, Mem0, CrewAI, whatever's next. Tools that didn't exist two years ago and might not matter two years from now. No attachment. Learn, ship, let go.

At the bottom: fundamentals. How computers actually work. Memory, processes, networking. Distributed systems. Failure modes.

In the middle? Squeezed to nothing. The framework glue. This is what's being eaten.

And untouched by it all, serene in its knowledge that it is the human law if not the Universal law - value. The exchange thereof.

The Compression Imperative

Programming has always been compression. You take the sprawling mess of what you want to happen and compress it into something a machine can expand back into behavior.

The old Unix nerds understood this. Read some old man pages sometime. See their terseness, the compression. Every character paying rent. The medium was syntax, but the soul was compression.

Now syntax has become grammar - natural language - but the compression imperative intensified. Every token costs money, latency, context window space. The laws of information entropy remain undefeated.

The best prompt engineers write like the people who wrote man pages.

Moving Up or Getting Eaten

Value is knowing where to place the lever. Agent-to-agent communication lives here. Your agent talks to their agent. What's the handshake? This is API design, but fuzzier. More like diplomacy than engineering.

Meaning is the final boss. Making sense of chaos. There is no linter for the Real World.

We're hiring for all layers of the hourglass.

At the top: Mem0 needs a Forward Deployed Engineer working with LLM/RAG systems and vector databases - integrating AI into production at the bleeding edge.

At the narrow waist: Pratilipi needs a Product Engineering Manager who can lead product and platform decisions while coaching engineers to operate with autonomy - the Value layer personified.

At the foundation: CodeRabbit wants a Principal Engineer with deep distributed systems expertise - someone who's consumed the complexity below.

The stack is dead. Long live the stack.