On the Changing Role of Software Engineers

Software engineering as we used to know it is dead. AI condensed the code-writing step of the process from days to minutes. Engineers found themselves having many tasks on their plates, running many agents in parallel. They are burning out tokens and themselves at the same speed. However, I argue that the approach is incorrect. Because one aspect of software engineering hasn’t changed: having an ownership mindset. Today, the ownership mindset defines the role. Although I’ve been preaching about it for a long time, establishing an ownership mindset finally became feasible with AI. I had various conversations with software engineering leaders over the last few months, trying to understand the changing role of software engineers. Perhaps for the first time ever, we are in consensus about job titles: we have no idea what to call software engineers after they powered up with AI. Context engineers? Product engineers? AI engineers? Prompt engineers? AI-native software engineers? Full-stack…