… and AI has fundamentally changed the way I think about what it means to be a software engineer.

The last few years, but 2025 in particular, has been a whirlwind when it comes to the capabilities and skills AIs can offer. Ranging from almost instantly answering complex questions, all the way to making full plans and executing them autonomously. Where at first it was easy to discard their nature as being simple predictive parrots, we are now starting to realise that when designed correctly AI agents are much more capable. Increasing context windows, reiterating plan structures and having feedback loops within tasks, dare I say it, suddenly AI feels like it’s „thinking“ much more so than ever before.

From a software perspective, tools like Claude Code or Cursor are capable of implementing, modifying and debugging reasonably complex issues, if provided with enough context. They have become much better at understanding surrounding code structures, plus adhering to workspace code guidelines and patterns.

Automated tooling is now wide scale available, where some GitHub repositories launch automatic agents to create PRs when an issue is created, then a separate automated agent will review the PR and add notes. Sometimes this can go back and forth multiple times before a human even looks at the PR.

There is many examples of these AI guided development workflows, two I find very inspiring is Charlie Marsh‘s „uv“ and another Jarred Sumner‘s „Bun“ (now owned by Anthropic). These are not small hobby projects, they are massively popular tools which have to be carefully worked on and these people are succeeding by doing so with AI.

After over a decade as a software engineer, nothing has shifted my view on how development works so drastically as these recent advancements of AI. In the past, new tools (e.g. for debugging, observability, code structuring, etc.) were released all the time and were worth investing the time to learn, but nothing compares to the effect that AI has and will have. In my opinion AI is a tool a software engineer will have to learn to use. You will not be able to avoid it. It is able, unequivocally, to speed up a lot of tasks for me already. If you haven’t yet, my plea is, go and try it out. Learn how to use it effectively, learn what it is able to do, and crucially what it isn’t. Find workflows that speed you up in the right places.

To non-technical and leading staff: Make sure your engineers have the resources available to learn and use these tools. This doesn’t mean you have to burn through thousands of pounds and millions of tokens, even just baseline access to something like Claude or Cursor are a massive deal. Most engineers I know are naturally inclined to improve their skillset, they want to ride the wave of new technologies and advancements. Locking them out of these tools not only means that you’re likely slowing down development, but also realistically are frustrating your staff with a feeling of being left behind by the industry.

Now, the big question is: Where does that leave the role of a software engineer? The most important part at play here is the human factor. Someone needs to understand the domain, someone needs to understand the product requirements, someone needs to translate them to machine requirements and someone needs to validate and manually correct issues. The real skill of an engineer isn’t writing the code itself, it’s being able to deeply understand a problem and reflecting it in a performant, secure and available system. AI doesn’t really replace any core capabilities here, it just massively enhances the speed by which they can be delivered. A good engineer will be able to leverage these tools and continue to deliver high-quality code at a faster rate, allowing them to focus on more or multiple issues at a time. A bad engineer will use it as a crutch, without reviewing the automated work. Which inevitably will start to muddle the carefully crafted systems, creating tech debt and incrementally adding unsolveable riddles.

It really wouldn’t surprise me if by the end of 2026 the core competencies of skilled developers in high velocity teams will have shifted. Where previously their time was mostly spent writing code by themselves, it will be mostly consumed by planning, reviewing, and correcting code written by AI.

I find this thought equally unnerving and exciting. I spent years learning and improving my craft, seeing it upended like this leaves me with a very strange feeling. That being said, I choose to view this change positively. After all, progress is exciting, and learning is exciting too (I promise!). Being part of the first wave of engineers that get to explore this new way of building on technology feels empowering, I just need to make sure it’s not leaving me behind. At the end of the day, I would see it as a failure of myself if a machine was able to replace me, instead of me being able to drive the machine to do what I want it to do.