VORA: Value Over Replacement Agent

I’m not the world’s biggest baseball fan, but I’ve always loved VORP (Value over replacement player). It’s an idea I’ve riffed on numerous times for various situations - basically take an average of X and evaluate individual emails, flows, etc against that average. What do those specific X bring to the table vs. the average? What makes them special and unique?

Working off the idea that AI is Mediocre - one way to look at our value as developers now is what do we bring to the table above an agent? What’s our value over and above a replacement agent?

If you could be replaced with an entirely fine, but utterly average developer tomorrow, what would your employer lose?

Some of the things that good developers bring to the table:

• A deep knowledge in a specific area (the 'T' shaped developer)
• An ability to push back to simplify requirements and build a simpler project
• An understanding of the history of a project and the patterns and systems to apply.
• An understanding of the likely scale of a project and the appropriate complexity to address that scale.
• Knowledge of the overall direction of the organization and projects in-flight to effectively thread any one project into the overall stream.

What's interesting about this list is that they are all soft skills that revolve around how to approach the work, compared to the work itself.

Much like the famous Supreme Court quote from the 60's - most people know a good developer when they see one, but they might be unable to pinpoint exactly what makes them good.

Some developers find a way to heroically struggle and add complexity to any project they are on while others do just the opposite - projects quietly arrive on time and on budget. Projects assigned to excellent developers seem to just get done, without all the Sturm und Drang. This is a pattern that seems to be continuing with the AI Assisted development era as some constantly developers find ways vibe themselves into a corner, while others just use the tool to do good work.

How does one become an excellent developer with a high VORA? I think it's a number of things, but not tackling projects as only coding challenges but rather as systems problems - optimizing the processes and meta-processes (see The 3x3 Rules of AI Assisted Software Development ) at the same time as the code.

A high-VORA developer isn’t the person who can write code faster than the agent. That ship has sailed. Rather, they are an effective captain who can steer projects towards the calm waters of simplicity and away from the shoals of chaos and complexity, taking a long-term view of the journey and not losing the horizon in the waves. (Ok, that took the ship/sailing metaphor too far, but you get the point).