Supervisory Engineering Work

Automation is not new in software development. We’ve been automating parts of our process for decades - build pipelines, testing, deployments. With AI, we’re now able to automate work that previously required humans with specialised skills to do by hand - specifically, the writing of the code. In other words, AI is enabling us to automate a larger portion of the job that software engineers used to do themselves. This post is a companion to my opening keynote at Agentic Engineering Day in Auckland on 22 October 2026, The Accidental Rise of the Supervisory Engineer (slides). I’ll share the recording once it’s available. As part of my Masters research on the impact of AI on software engineering, I wanted to understand how AI might shift engineers’ focus across the common tasks that developers generally spend their time on when building software. What I found was a creation-to-verification shift, with engineers shifting their focus towards verification-based tasks such as testing and…