A response to “LLMs are Eroding My Software Engineering Career and I Don’t Know What To Do” - and to everyone I keep hearing this same anguish from. You’re not wrong that the ground is moving. You’re wrong about which ground.
There’s a thing going around the engineering blogs and Hacker News right now: AI killed Agile, Waterfall is back, write your specs up front, welcome to “Waterfall 2.0.” You may have seen the Medium piece titled Agile Is Dead. AI Killed It. Welcome Back, Waterfall.. Hmmm.
And once I followed the logic far enough, I ran into a second question that nobody seems to want to answer out loud: if the agent writes the code, who actually reads it?
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.
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.
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.
Open source is about to get a lot messier. Not because the code is getting worse – because AI agents just changed the economics of “fork it and fix it yourself.”
Grace Hopper built the first compiler in 1952. They said “you can’t make them understand English-like instructions.” She had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. Sound familiar? Grace had some thoughts about this kind of thinking. She had a lot of thoughts, actually.
“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.
I had a lot of fun being interviewed by Aimee Vincent-Bunn who hosts the fabulous Women in STEM podcast.
I had a lot of fun being interviewed by James Holder for the Software Synergy Podcast. You can listen on Spotify or Apple.
Three months since I posted, so here’s some random thoughts and updates.
What’s old is new again: I’ve joined BrightSign as their Head of Software Engineering!