Career on Greg Herlein

The Future of Software Engineering: What I Know and How I Know It

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:01 -0800

A recent industry retreat of senior engineering practitioners published their findings on where software development is heading. Reading it felt like someone had been reading my mind — and the minds of the people I follow online — and synthesized it all into one document. When a lot of people arrive at the same conclusions independently, that’s signal worth paying attention to. Here’s my take on each major theme.

The End of the Glorified Babysitter

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:01 -0800

There’s a reckoning coming for a specific type of software engineering manager. Not the good ones. The ones who turned themselves into human Jira routers. The ones whose primary skill is translating documents into tickets and running standups. Those jobs? Gone. Faster than you think.

Get Stuff Done

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:01 -0100

Look, I’m going to be direct here. If you are not using AI agentic coding methods right now - today - you are going too slow. Not “a little behind.” Not “maybe missing something.” Too damn slow.

Where I Learned Excellence

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve been thinking a lot about excellence lately. Not the motivational-poster kind. The real kind – the kind that gets baked into your bones when you’re twenty-two years old and surrounded by people who simply will not accept anything less. For me, that happened on a nuclear submarine.

AI-Boosted Building - It's All About Agency

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0800

A Scottish football manager once said, “Some people think football is more important than life. But they are wrong. It’s much more important than that.” When intelligence becomes a utility, the ability to ACT on it becomes everything. In today’s software world, Agency is more important than anything else!

The Three Tiers of Software Development (Where will you land?)

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Software development is stratifying into three distinct tiers. Where you land will determine whether you make more money, the same, or far less than today.

2025 In Review: The Year AI Changed Everything

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

Looking back at 2025, one theme dominates: AI agentic programming went from novelty to necessity. This year transformed how I think about software development, career advice, and even my personal hardware projects. Here’s what I wrote about, what I learned, and what I expect in 2026.

Coding is Solved (And That's Fine)

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

“We are nearly at coder-equivalency for economically useful coding. A sufficiently experienced software engineer can now write >90% of production-ready code purely through prompting.” Yes, exactly.