For better or worse, I have been fully immersed in having AI agents write my code for me. It’s been a real values / paradigm shift and despite the code never being able to meet my expectations on the first pass, with subsequent prompts we get to where we need to.
And with recent developments, I think I have come to the conclusion that the world that I grew up in as a software engineer is largely over. Coding assistants will take over having to manually write code yourself, it’s just so much faster at doing that!
One area where there still is value is that as an engineer you still need to be able to make the correct design decisions in order to keep your code maintainable. Leaving agents alone to their own is a quick recipe for a spaghetti monster. I have to say though, that’s not to say that leaving engineers alone without incentives to build maintainable code will not lead to a spaghetti monster.
The interesting thing I found with making the correct design decision is that you can skew the output of our coding agents towards those design decisions through the use of skills.
So I’m really left at the point where seriously question how many software engineers do we really need.
