Software Engineering

Originally written in June 2025. This is a more detailed version of a talk from around the same time. Everyone keeps saying “AI is changing software engineering.” Depending on who you listen to, that means either: “Developers are finally 10x more productive,” or “Developers are finally 0x employed.” Reality, as usual, is less dramatic and more interesting. A normal day for most engineers in 2025 looks something like this: You open your IDE. You have a TypeScript backend, or a Java microservice, or a Python data pipeline. There is an issue tracker, a CI pipeline, some dashboards that may or may not be lying to you. Someone on the team is arguing about naming and someone else is quietly fighting with YAML. ...