- Published on
📝 The End of Software Engineering?
- Authors
- Name
- Chengchang Yu
- @chengchangyu
Every week, I see posts on Hacker News, Reddit, and Twitter declaring “the end of software engineering.” AI can write code. So engineers are obsolete… right?
Not quite.
AI has made code cheap. But software is still expensive.
Because the hard parts were never:
- Writing syntax
- Scaffolding CRUD apps
- Connecting APIs
The hard parts are:
- Understanding the real problem
- Designing systems that survive production
- Managing scale, failures, and trade-offs
- Knowing what to build — and why
AI is great at generating code. It’s still weak at architecture, judgment, and long-term system thinking.
So the role of engineers isn’t disappearing. It’s shifting upward.
From:
“How do I write this function?”
To:
“What system should exist in the first place?”
In the AI era, the most valuable engineers won’t be the fastest typists. They’ll be the ones with taste, judgment, and ownership.
The barrier to entry is lower than ever. But the bar for real engineering just got higher.