Software Engineering Is Dead. Long Live Product Engineering
Coding is now a job for machines, but the real work — figuring out what to build and for whom — is more human than ever. Drawing on Laurie Voss, who co-founded npm, Conor Bronsdon argues that product sense, customer conversations, and context engineering are the skills that matter now. He bets agents will absorb technical product management work within 2 to 5 years, not 10, and worries most about how junior engineers will ever build judgment.
When a customer says 'I need to keep track of my orders,' there are ten thousand pieces of software that fit that sentence, and only one of them is right for a bakery.
- betteryet
Software Engineering is not dead, damn it. Anything research and original is not dead. Are these things fantastic at connecting concepts, producing digital work products, and putting out derivate hypotheses? Sure. But proper original thought is still firmly in the realm of humans. Though speed of propagation of new ideas probably did change massively.
- chasd00
The line between Computer Science and Software Engineering is pretty blurry and the term "Software Engineering" has been controversial from the get go. Bolting together established enterprise patterns may be dead but creative problem solving with automation and the science of computers surely is not.
- trentnix
It’s not dead, but it’s starting to feel nostalgic. There will always be a few (of us) who still read the code, like the old school “operator” from The Matrix. And maybe the software geeks that still read code will be better for it, but that will eventually be just at the boundaries.