I never thought this day would come during my software engineering career. But finally AI is smart enough to do the work of a software engineer.
I’ve been working as a software engineer since 2011 at various companies and levels. Literally I’ve been coding almost 15++ years. Initially it was not easy for me to make peace with the changes happening around AI.
Last year I used AI for the first time. Mostly for writing unit test cases in my React JS based project. I was happy with the outcome as we software engineers hate to write unit test cases. During that time, I did use co-pilot by GitHub for auto completion thats it (since it was given free at my workplace). Nothing much impressive and I didn’t push AI further.
But this year the progress AI has made is tremendous. For me Claude changed the game for me completely when I tried it for the first time. When I first used Opus 4.5 model to write backend code in spring boot (which I’m not so familiar with), I’ve realized that the end has arrived for my career (or at least what I thought I will do for rest of my career).
Recently I used Google’s Antigravity to do an iOS app end to end. I just did pure VIBE coding without even touching the code. It was mind boggling experience to experience it for the first time. Even it helped me to configure iCloud configurations including CloudKit setup.
This is a game changer and eye opener for me. Basically I felt like I’m a project manager and a lead engineer guiding a junior engineer to do the grinding for me. Initially I couldn’t accept the reality. How can a LLM would be more smarter than me. All the experience and skills I honed over the past one and half year is useless now? How could it think more logically and points out things I didn’t even think about.
Going forward, we all Software Engineers need to accept the fact that AI is going to do most of our work. We need to position ourselves to be in a place where we can verify the way AI doing things right or wrong. So we need to take up different roles like an architect, project manager, lead engineer, problem solver or even a creative thinker.
Make sure to listen to this speech by ruby on rails developer. He was hated by some for saying this though.
We are in a transition period, I believe as a senior engineer, this is a time to adapt and move forward with AI, rather than fighting against AI. As AI’s capacity unfolds and expands further, we will figure out our roles too. Its not the end of road, lets face it together and stay relevant.
Adapt or die off.
Banner photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich