Published
Like most other software engineers I've been having somewhat of an existential crisis this past year. When Opus 4.8 was released I realised that AI models have now reached the point where they can code better than I can. In fact all of the best software engineers I've ever worked with have now 100% switched over to AI. They no longer write any code. Give AI any task and it will be able to perform it faster, cheaper and with fewer mistakes than me. Naturally, that realisation has made me a little nostalgic, and I've found myself looking back over my 15-year career.
I want to start by saying I am very pro-AI. It's the most exciting and revolutionary technology we've ever seen, and I have no doubt that, if used responsibly, it will improve our quality of life immeasurably through breakthroughs in medicine and STEM. It's actually a privilege to be able to see it play out in real time and if I'm collateral damage as a result then that's fine by me. Although, for what it's worth, I still think we're a long way from the total collapse of the software engineering industry. For the foreseeable future, humans will still be the differentiator.
Okay back to my trip down memory lane.
First of all I've been incredibly, incredibly lucky. I am frequently told by members of my family that I spend too much time on my computer, but computers are like the strongest drug in the world to me. They've given me some of the happiest and most memorable moments of my life. I remember playing King's Quest I as a six-year-old and being transported into another world through a computer screen felt genuinely magical. Years later, the first time I played GTA III and saw an entire city teeming with life and detail, just waiting to be explored kind of blew my mind. Then there was the sense of achievement that came from hosting my first website and realising that anyone, anywhere in the world could visit something I had created. So getting to play around with computers for the last 15 years and getting paid well to do so has been a dream career for me.
I have often heard my friends talking about the "Sunday evening dread", that sinking feeling you get once you pass 5pm on a Sunday evening knowing that you have to go back to work the following day but this is something I've never been able to relate to. Apart from a few tedious stints spent working for web agencies, I can honestly say that I have enjoyed every moment I've spent at work. I enjoy working on my own but getting to work on problems with other engineers who share the same passion and enthusiasm for computers and engineering has been super fun.
It's not just the work I'll remember fondly either. Something people don't realise is just how funny the software engineering industry is, there's been some stories over the years that still make me chuckle when I think about them, like:
[A GitLab employee accidentally deleting the production database (opens in a new tab)](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/postmortem-of-database-outage-of-january-31/) -
[When Egor Homakov hacked GitHub (opens in a new tab)](https://gist.github.com/peternixey/1978249) -
[When Azer Koçulu unpublished left-pad after npm sided with Kik in the module name dispute (opens in a new tab)](https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm)
There are countless others I could list, but what I love about these stories is that there's something wonderfully human about all of them. Computing is built on logic, but the people behind it have always been funny, chaotic and flawed.
It feels a bit strange how a skill I've spent fifteen years developing is no longer scarce but I'm okay with that. I've never been a programming evangelist so my identity and self-worth has never been tied to being good at it. Coding has always just been a (sometimes slow and frustrating) means to an end so it's actually kind of cool that we no longer have to do it. I wonder if I'll look back in 20 years and chuckle thinking "I can't believe we used to write code with our hands". The joy for me has always been building, seeing an idea in my head or a solution to a problem come to life is incredibly rewarding so being able to accelerate that process with AI as the catalyst means I'm having more fun than ever before.
I have no idea what my job will look like in five years, let alone twenty. Maybe software engineers will still be around, maybe we'll all become glorified product managers talking to fleets of AI agents, or maybe something completely different will emerge that none of us can predict yet.
Whatever happens, I feel incredibly fortunate that I got to experience this era of computing. So if this really is it, it's been good.