I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
The author says software engineering felt secure in 2021, but by 2026 he expects the industry to change so much that his work may disappear. He thinks the core question for the next decade is whether tech companies will undershoot or overshoot AI agents’ capabilities.
He argues that AI is already getting better at the maintenance work engineers rely on, including code review, bug fixing, and codebase navigation. He thinks companies may keep hiring engineers longer than they should, or later scramble for experienced people to supervise large AI-generated codebases, but he does not expect demand for engineers to rise overall. The post ends with the view that the loss of that security feels bad, even if automation has finally reached software engineers.
Reading notes#
- Good software engineers benefited from code’s leverage to automate other jobs, and the author sees AI automating software engineering as a kind of return on that logic.
- As a staff engineer, he thinks his own work already resembles supervising AI agents, so he expects junior and mid-level engineers to be affected first.
- He frames the next decade as a choice between tech companies undershooting AI and keeping engineers longer, or overshooting and then scrambling for senior talent to manage AI-generated systems.
- He rejects the idea that demand will rise because software production expands, since he thinks AI can also maintain and clean up code.
- His own use of AI tools leads him to believe they are getting steadily better at answering codebase questions and sometimes outperforming him.
- He still hopes he is wrong and that some human element remains necessary to deliver good software.