We are all Product Engineers now

The job of making software will become what the agents can’t do

Possibly safe:

• Deciding what to build in the first place

• Deciding the definition of “good”

• Making it delightful: we can all tell the difference between a piece of software that gets the job done and one that’s actually easy and fun to use. Can an agent? The current state of agentic design does not suggest that they can, but this one is the most wobbly of the three.

All juniors did was write the code you told them to, and that’s gone

the whole point of hiring a junior: you gave them a well-specified ticket, they produced mediocre code, a senior reviewed it, and over about a decade of that they absorbed enough judgment to become the senior.

figure out what to build, not how to build it

The market wants people with context and taste and we are simply not training those

universities will eventually notice that "requirements analysis" is a course people would pay for

The craft as paid work is mostly dead, and that is a real loss

A lot of people got into programming because they love the craft of it. The feeling of a clean abstraction. The satisfaction of a hard bug finally yielding. The specific pleasure of making a machine do exactly what you told it, which is a pleasure most jobs don't offer. Those people did not sign up to interview bakers.

That's a real loss and it's a loss for the profession as well as for the people, because the craft is where a lot of the taste I've been talking about actually came from, and we're about to find out what taste looks like when nobody grew up doing the thing.

a fair number of the people who think they loved the typing, the part they actually loved was the moment before the typing, when a vague mess of a problem resolved into a precise shape in their head. That moment is the job now. If that's what you loved, you're going to be fine and possibly better than fine, because the industry is about to be desperate for you

The other is that the craft survives, the way woodworking survived the furniture factory, as a thing people do because they love it and occasionally get paid a premium for. Developers write software the way singers sing. That was true when it was free and it'll be true when it's automated, and the people who love it will keep doing it, and some of the best software will keep coming from them. It just won't be the job.

I think the next ten years are going to be ugly, because the load is arriving before the tools do, the junior ladder is gone before the replacement exists, and a lot of people who loved the craft are going to have to decide whether they love the job that's replacing it.

the horizon I can see, the forecast is: more software, more people making it, and almost none of them typing. We are all product engineers now, whether we like it or not, and a lot of us won't.