Summary

In this episode of The Test Set, Wes McKinney and Michael Chow interview Benn Stancil about cultural shifts in data, AI's impact on software creation, and the economics of building in an AI world. Wes shares his experience transitioning from writing code to directing AI agents, describing both the exhilaration and existential dread that came with that shift. He discusses how AI has unlocked a 20-year backlog of side projects he never had time to build, while also creating a new kind of guilt about not keeping agents running constantly. The conversation explores whether software is becoming content, the viability of small 'boy band' teams over venture-backed scaling, and how unstructured data may replace traditional quantified analytics now that LLMs can do approximate math on text.

Key Insight

AI agents have transformed software engineering from a deliberative craft into something more like content creation — unlocking enormous creative potential while triggering existential questions about identity, sustainability, and whether the market can absorb what we're now capable of producing.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 4

  I have a whole mental backlog of projects I thought of building over the last 20 years that I just never had the time or inclination to work on. Now I can have a terminal tab that's just working on that side project I thought of eight years ago.

• 7

  Do you like being able to close the laptop now? No, and that's becoming a bit of a problem. When I close the laptop, I feel guilty. I'm like — the computer could be doing things right now.

• 5

  I spent a lot of 2025 in a state of essentially existential dread about what it means to be a software engineer.

• 4

  The rapid pace of AI development was, for me, disruptive to my core identity as a person who has spent a lot of time becoming good at software engineering, getting really good at writing code.

• 6

  I still care about code quality, how fast my test suite runs, how fast the code runs, the long-term sustainability, the growth of the code base. I think a lot of vibe-coded software is going to reach some kind of breaking point if there's not a reinvestment in architectural quality and design patterns.

• 4

  We're going to build 10 to 100 times as much software, and yes, it's going to be built by AI, but there's still going to be a lot of professional software engineers.

• 6

  It's both exciting and fun, and I'm having a lot of fun. But there's also this weird joyless grind happening where a big part of the tech industry is working harder and longer than they ever have before, and a lot of people are not having any fun.

Tone

reflective