On Being an Engineer in 2026

gosen

> Maybe one day agents will have their own experiences, too. Maybe they'll develop intuitions they can't quite explain, just like we do. Machine / program / software cannot have these things in my opinion because this stuff is produced by human consciousness which we cannot even fully explain yet. Someone has "to teach" the agent to have this stuff, but we don't have that knowledge. And also "intuition" is a feeling (like love, hate, sadness, joy) so no agent can have that until they have the limbic system, prefrontal cortex and other stuff.

wrs

At first I thought tacit knowledge would be a differentiator: LLMs are trained on writing, so they can’t learn things that have never been written down. But tacit knowledge is exactly what reinforcement learning post-training is about. So (just as with humans) the limitation is in providing a rich enough environment, with good enough feedback, to train in the tacit knowledge.

xnx

On Being an [Software] Engineer (i.e. AI agent manager) in 2026

somesortofthing

To be honest, I doubt the current state of things will hold much longer. Current AI can automate virtually all of my work as a pre-AI senior and is rapidly closing in on being able to automate the types of work that have emerged post-AI too. I have a hard time imagining a world where a drop-in end-to-end replacement for a full software team is more than a year away. I'm sure I'll have a job for a year or two past that, but there'll be some small stock market bump eventually and a bloodbath will begin the second the C-suite takes a closer look at what their engineers are even doing anymore.

hackyhacky

https://nitter.cf/shaharglazner/article/2119796029256032278 A readable link for those of us without Twitter/X account

saulpw

I'm a fan of the 'sandwich' model: someone needs to say what to do, someone needs to do it, and someone needs to say if it's been done [well enough]. Even if AI can do that middle bit entirely, we still need humans at the beginning and the end. Replace the humans at the start and you have a paperclip-optimizer; replace them at the end and you have slop. The problem is that software in corporations has typically been product managers at the front, software engineers in the middle, and QA at the end. Software developers who also have good product sense and do diligent QA are still needed. Programmers who treated their job as leetcode exercises are not needed anymore.

Isamu

If you can’t make things right when your agent goes wrong, then yeah you’re not adding value. If you can’t tell the difference between the agent hallucinations and the useful stuff, then yeah you’re not adding value. If you can’t steer the agent in a useful direction instead of just standing back, then yeah…

nphardon

The trick is to remain intellectually stimulated and challenged.

kokanee

I don't buy the reductio ad absurdum, which hinges on the assertion that some developers are still 10x more productive than others due to differences in their engineering potential. I think that A) however you're measuring productivity is probably not capturing the full story, and B) one of the most important reasons people have differences in productivity is because not everyone puts the same amount of effort in. It's not necessarily because they don't have the ability to stay off of reddit and work longer hours and prompt more furiously, it's because not everyone is equally motivated to do so (hence the entire field of management). I also don't buy the idea that there is special human stardust that gives us permanent irreplaceable economic value. Even if the tacit knowledge that the current generation of engineers were able to build up in the years prior to ~2025 does give us value that won't be completely replaced for a long time, why would you assume that the delta between what you can do and what claude can do will still be worth $200K in 5 years?

empressario

Oh he means programmers. I thought he meant real engineers.

mjr00

> If anything, 10x engineers have become 100x engineers. And the average engineer is still average. This is the real fear. We had a flood of engineers who entered the profession in the past 10-15 years who were decidedly average. No real interest in software development beyond "it's a cushy desk job, or better yet WFH job, that pays really well." No interest in whatever product was being developed by their company. Just show up, their PM assigns them a ticket to make a widget with a button, they use their TypeScript bootcamp skills to code up a widget with a button, ticket moved to In Review, job's done. Now an agent can do that, and you need fewer of these types of people. Like, a lot fewer. Every engineer on your team who isn't a 10x-cum-100x engineer feels like a massive lost opportunity. The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs. I'm really unsure what's going to happen to the average ones.

arichard123

It's all about trust

kypro

Something I was thinking to myself last week – "if I believe SWE is more or less dead then why am I so busy?" Clearly there is still some work to do, but the work I do now is very different, and for me, much less enjoyable. I'm not solving challenging logic or algorithmic problems anymore, but basically just iterating on features with agents or getting them to look into things for me. It sucks because I used to be very good at these things, but my edge against less competent SWEs doesn't really exist anymore. More annoyingly, people I work with are producing a lot of code that I think the design of kinda sucks, but agents can force the design to work and so it works. I suggest we do things another way, but I'm now just slowing things down and it's hard to argue against the comment, "if that becomes a problem we can just get Claude to refactor later". I guess what I'm saying is that I think think there's a really crappy job that will still exist for a while around managing and contributing to these agent-generated codebases. But skill is less about your technical abilities, but how good you are at hooking up agents to things and getting them to solve problems. This doesn't interest me at all though. My desire to spend a lot of time design and thinking about problems, and deeply understanding the codebase I'm maintaining now just work against me. I think there will be SWEs by some definition, but the job as it existed a few years ago is gone. Not even saying that's a bad thing, but for someone like myself, it may as well be dead.

cadamsdotcom

AI is NOT coming for your job. Not your whole job... It's coming to take away the roles in your job that can be done by AI . It happened before and it'll happen again. Humans adapt - there's more work now than ever. Some examples from the 20th century... Big companies used to have printing departments to which you'd send a print job, walk over and pick it up, nicely stapled. Nowadays the office printer sits there 24/7 awaiting your print job. You have to staple it yourself though. Big companies used to have secretaries & clerical staff who'd type up your letter and send it off for you. Now we have keyboards and email. You have to send the email yourself though. Big companies used to have "code typists" who typed out huge amounts of code. Now they have agent managers who delegate the typing. Getting good output is a challenge, but asking for the output you need is so much better than RSI from typing and so much more effective than debugging based only on one's puny human knowledge, that we're suffering through. You have to assure the quality of the work yourself though. It's strange seeing so many people take to their blogs and loudly declare themselves unemployable. I doubt anyone'd hire this author and that'll make their prophecy come true - for them. A cautionary tale indeed.

latentsea

This is copiummaxxing.

bonsai_spool

I'm curious how actual engineering fields are affected - this highlights the imprecision we use when we call programmers/developers "software engineers." Other engineering disciplines, presumably, don't change so drastically from one year to the next...