{"slug": "place-your-bets", "title": "Place Your Bets!", "summary": "Codemanship founder Jason Gorman is betting that software development fundamentals will remain relevant despite the rise of AI, predicting that LLMs will become just another tool and that the percentage of developers who truly understand fundamentals will stay at roughly 1% through 2039. Gorman, who has run the business for 17 years, argues that concepts like comprehension, complexity, coupling, duplication, and feedback loops are timeless, and he offers a training module on applying these fundamentals to AI-assisted and agentic development workflows.", "body_md": "All business is a gamble. That product idea you had might succeed, and it might not. That person you hired might work out, and they might not. That business loan might get repaid, and it might not.\n\nEven a small business like Codemanship has to speculate about where things might go, and we’re all sailing on a sea of uncertainty and surprises.\n\nWhen I started the business, I was betting that the software development fundamentals that were important in 1969 and in 1999 were just as important in 2009. Technologies come and go. Buzzwords have half-lives. Fads and fashions are tomorrow’s fish & chip paper. But comprehension is comprehension. Complexity is complexity. Coupling is coupling. Duplication is duplication. Feedback loops are feedback loops. What we choose to call these things from moment to moment doesn’t change what they are.\n\n17 years later, I’m making the same bet – the fundamentals demonstrably [still matter today](https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/01/05/the-ai-ready-software-developer-conclusion-same-game-different-dice/), and will matter a decade from now and a decade after that. And it doesn’t matter who’s typing the code or whether they’re doing it in a “harness” or a “loop” or a “graph”.\n\nThere are good reasons to believe that LLMs are an Artificial Intelligence cul-de-sac and that the hyper-scalers aren’t economically viable, too. The long-term future of generative AI on that scale is far from assured, and the fundamental limitations of the technology – especially when it comes to reliability for many business use cases – seem insurmountable.\n\nBut even if that wasn’t true, LLMs and the agents we build around them seem destined to end up just another tool in the box. I’ll be interested to see who still has “AI” in their LinkedIn profiles this time next year. That’s the thing with fads – easy come, easy go.\n\nAnd in the meantime – AI or not – the fundamentals will continue to matter, just as surely as we’ll continue to reinvent and rename those wheels that get rediscovered with every generation that refuses to read anything about software development written more than 10 years ago. Get with it, Granddad!\n\nI try to stay current in the terminology and the technology so I can be down with the kids. Yes, I have a training module on AI-assisted and agentic development, but it’s specifically about how [the fundamentals can be applied to those kinds of workflows](https://www.tickettailor.com/events/codemanship/2324138) – not just AI-compatible, but *essential*.\n\nI’m also betting that the fundamentals will remain the same niche minority pursuit it’s been my entire career. It’s kind of scandalous, when you think about it – just how few in our industry know them and apply them to their pretty well-paid work. It was ~1% in 1999. It’s ~1% today. And I strongly suspect – despite AI code generation making it screamingly obvious that teams need these fundamentals now – it’ll still be ~1% in 2039.\n\nIf you don’t believe me, try hiring a developer who can actually do refactoring for real – [or even knows what it is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2OFKQAI5ms).\n\nThis means I’m betting my business won’t grow significantly, and that there will continue to be tough times when the industry goes through another boom-and-bust cycle or when organisations get distracted by another Shiny New ThingTM that boosters promise will solve all the problems that the fundamentals already solved decades ago.\n\nI will remain fashionably unfashionable, and stay in my lane that I’m betting will remain niche and intermittently lucrative – because I believe it matters, and will continue to matter.\n\nPlus ça change.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/place-your-bets", "canonical_source": "https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/08/21/place-your-bets/", "published_at": "2026-08-21 07:46:54+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-21 08:13:31.720921+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "ai-agents", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Codemanship", "Jason Gorman"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/place-your-bets", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/place-your-bets.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/place-your-bets.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/place-your-bets.jsonld"}}