Engineers aren't obsolete yet—and experience is why
On Being an Engineer in 2026
Engineers keep handing off more work to AI agents—code, writing, even debugging and architecture—yet great engineers still outperform average ones by a wider margin than before. Using proof by contradiction, the author argues humans retain real leverage: intuition, judgment about what's genuinely hard, and lived experience that can't be fully articulated. Concepts like emergence and tacit knowledge explain why we know more than we can tell—and why that gap keeps us needed.
Great engineers are still producing much better results than average engineers. If anything, 10x engineers have become 100x engineers.
- mjr00
> If anything, 10x engineers have become 100x engineers. And the average engineer is still average.
This is the real fear. We had a flood of engineers who entered the profession in the past 10-15 years who were decidedly average. No real interest in software development beyond "it's a cushy desk job, or better yet WFH job, that pays really well." No interest in whatever product was being developed by their company. Just show up, their PM assigns them a ticket to make a widget with a button, they use their TypeScript bootcamp skills to code up a widget with a button, ticket moved to In Review, job's done.
Now an agent can do that, and you need fewer of these types of people. Like, a lot fewer. Every engineer on your team who isn't a 10x-cum-100x engineer feels like a massive lost opportunity.
The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs. I'm really unsure what's going to happen to the average ones.
- somesortofthing
To be honest, I doubt the current state of things will hold much longer. Current AI can automate virtually all of my work as a pre-AI senior and is rapidly closing in on being able to automate the types of work that have emerged post-AI too. I have a hard time imagining a world where a drop-in end-to-end replacement for a full software team is more than a year away. I'm sure I'll have a job for a year or two past that, but there'll be some small stock market bump eventually and a bloodbath will begin the second the C-suite takes a closer look at what their engineers are even doing anymore.
- hackyhacky
https://nitter.cf/shaharglazner/article/2119796029256032278
A readable link for those of us without Twitter/X account
- Isamu
If you can’t make things right when your agent goes wrong, then yeah you’re not adding value. If you can’t tell the difference between the agent hallucinations and the useful stuff, then yeah you’re not adding value. If you can’t steer the agent in a useful direction instead of just standing back, then yeah…
- saulpw
I'm a fan of the 'sandwich' model: someone needs to say what to do, someone needs to do it, and someone needs to say if it's been done [well enough]. Even if AI can do that middle bit entirely, we still need humans at the beginning and the end. Replace the humans at the start and you have a paperclip-optimizer; replace them at the end and you have slop.
The problem is that software in corporations has typically been product managers at the front, software engineers in the middle, and QA at the end. Software developers who also have good product sense and do diligent QA are still needed. Programmers who treated their job as leetcode exercises are not needed anymore.