I don’t even know what a software engineer is supposed to be doing anymore. Do we code? Do we architect systems? AI agents have changed everything, and I don’t even know what to think.
I don’t write much code anymore. In my day job, I ask Claude to do most of the analysis, planning, and coding. My side projects are 100% written by Claude Code, and in some of these, I literally haven’t even reviewed the code because I trust Claude and because gStack reviews the code for me.
So I can still call myself a software developer, but I don’t think I can call myself a programmer anymore. But even in my role as a “software developer,” what I am doing is radically different. Writing code is a completely different animal from directing AI to write code. While I review the code that I write, that is not the same as reviewing the code that an agent writes for me.
Having an agent write code is like having another developer write your code for you and then reviewing it. It’s a totally different experience. You are no longer debugging typos and bugs but instead debugging the actual functionality of the code, and then having the agent fix the problems you find.
You are basically looking over the shoulder of another developer who doesn’t mind you micromanaging everything she does, and who will execute your every command without complaint. Coding and iterating happen a lot faster, but the cost of unclear thinking can go up quickly as well. You lose the coding experience but you gain productivity — usually by orders of magnitude.
Some developers lament this loss. Some developers don’t even realize what they are missing. Either way, something is being left behind for sure.
I am jumping into AI coding with both feet, but I will miss that flow state that I’d get into when everything is just clicking and time seems to melt away. I’ll lose that deep understanding of the codebase that comes from typing every line as I pass that work off to an agent. Eventually I may even lose those coding skills that I worked so hard to build up over the years.
And that’s OK, because I believe that I’ll gain even more. With AI, I can build a functioning website in an afternoon. I can build things that I don’t have a lot of experience with — I was mainly a front-end guy, and now building a back end is a breeze. I can code in languages that I’m not even familiar with. Claude Code writes much better SQL than I can.
The boring parts of coding go away completely, and I can focus more on the parts of coding that I like. For example, Claude will write as many unit tests as I tell it to. He will even write them before we code, and he will make them all work as we build the system. (Does anyone actually like writing unit tests?)
But there are also potential problems. It’s hard not to just rubber stamp anything that works as designed. Saying “Here is what I want done” is not the same thing as “Do this thing I want done the right way.” It is a struggle to stay engaged and pay proper attention when everything just works the first time through.
It’s not yet clear what, exactly, a job description for a software engineer will look like in the near future. For decades the job has been writing code. In the last few months, that has gone away, to be replaced by something that is still taking shape.
We still have keyboards, but what we are doing with them has changed out from under us.