AI Coding Is Solved. Software Engineering Isn’t.

If coding is "solved," is software engineering? Ajay Medury (software engineer) and Andrew Sierota (systems engineer) pick up where Episode 1 left off and get into the part that isn't solved: judgment. They trade notes on why weekly usage limits have quietly become the real project budget, what it's like to build a sharded Minecraft world solo as both product manager and principal engineer, what Amazon's New World got wrong about scale, running decorrelated multi-model code reviews, and what an AI "skill" actually is. It might all just be an act of intelligence.

In this episode:

• Why "coding is solved" but software engineering isn't, and why judgment is the expensive part
• The new bottleneck: weekly subscription usage limits as a hard budget
• Breaking a big build into modules and submodules, and shrinking scope to actually ship
• Wearing every hat at once: product manager and principal engineer
• New World and the problem of scale at launch
• Large codebases, heavy test coverage, and review rounds that exposed process gaps
• Pre-flight checks, linters, and spec-tracing that cut review loops down
• Decorrelated reviews: several different models reviewing blind, then taking the union of findings
• What an AI "skill" is: system prompts, user prompts, and guardrails for long workflows
• Severity tiers for findings: blockers, warnings, defers, suggestions, and nits
• Why systems admins, as generalists by trade, may be an ideal audience for these tools

Chapters:

• (00:00:00) - Real intelligence, or just an act?
• (00:01:02) - Coding is solved; software engineering isn't
• (00:02:02) - Keeping up with the release pace
• (00:05:27) - Vibe coding vs. a repeatable process
• (00:06:40) - Usage limits are the new budget
• (00:08:40) - Breaking the build into modules
• (00:12:18) - A sharded world, every hat on one builder
• (00:17:12) - New World and the problem of scale
• (00:25:04) - 200k lines and a 90-round review
• (00:27:20) - Pre-flight checks that cut 90 rounds to 5
• (00:30:49) - The podcast's own local-GPU pipeline
• (00:33:27) - Learning by asking "what do you mean?"
• (00:35:35) - When a large agent run burned through the budget
• (00:38:05) - What is a skill, really?
• (00:48:05) - Skills as guardrails for long workflows
• (00:51:09) - Severity tiers: blockers to nits
• (00:54:34) - Why sysadmins are ideal builders
• (00:56:29) - A long-running Minecraft community, the real driver
• (01:00:56) - Closing: an act of intelligence