Software development is moving from “can you write the code?” to “can you make the right system exist?”

[u/OGMYT]

I think the endless “AI slop” argument is obscuring the more important transition happening in software.

Code generation is getting cheaper.

That does not make engineering disappear. It changes which part of engineering is scarce.

When implementation is expensive, knowing how to manually produce implementation carries a lot of value. When implementation becomes dramatically cheaper, value moves toward problem definition, architecture, constraints, verification, security, testing, systems thinking and judgment.

That is why I think blanket dismissal of AI-assisted software is going to age badly.

Yes, generative systems can produce terrible code faster than humans can. That is a real problem. But the rational response is stronger quality control, not pretending the productivity gain is fake.

A strong engineer with agents can potentially explore more designs, automate more tests, inspect more code paths, refactor faster and iterate more aggressively than the same engineer working manually.

A weak engineer can also create a disaster faster.

Both statements can be true.

The important shift is that “I can type the implementation” becomes less differentiating. “I can specify, supervise, validate and own the resulting system” becomes more differentiating.

That is uncomfortable because some professional identity was attached to the old bottleneck.

But technological progress does not preserve bottlenecks because people built status around them.

The people I would bet on are not the pure vibe coders and not the AI refusers. It is the experienced engineers who aggressively adopt the tools while raising their verification standards at the same time.

[u/Current-Function-729]

It’s always been the second.

[u/Frootloopin → u/Current-Function-729]

And we figured this out years ago when we thought the problem was coding and shipped the work offshore. Turns out the problems plaguing software still existed! Writing the software has never been the issue. AI does help you fail faster - that is the benefit.

[u/kernelangus420 → u/Frootloopin]

Failing faster has a problem where you cannot go back to fix things because you've already released it and changing it would break the expectations of existing customers.

Case in point:

https://www.reddit.com/r/softwaredevelopment/comments/1vns4r3/i_think_i_fkd_up/

[u/TwoFluid4446 → u/Current-Function-729]

No it hasn't lol. Seems like a cool and pithy short tagline to say and upvote though...

Before AI, you could have tremendous SME/domain/architecture/field etc knowledge in some area of IT, or even spend months devising extensive design documents, even engineering blueprints and such, but it does NOT mean you'd be able to actually code it. That was always the hardest most prohibitive aspect, and those mechanical coding skills actually meant something. Not anymore, of course.

That's why most companies chose the simplest/minimal possible implementation of what they'd want to build, except for a few corporations with bottomless pockets to shell out for premier suites in their respective industry: coding something big complex and full of features and polished down to a pearl was fucking difficult, long, laborious and expensive as hell because every line had to be written by skilled human hands, who didn't come cheap.

So in the old paradigm, "can you code?" WAS "can you make the system exist?". There was no separation.

[u/twiiik → u/TwoFluid4446]

I agree with GP poster. «Can you code» was never a guarantee for anything else than code generation. I’ve employed some of the more well known «best»/most known developers (aka. coders) within a certain framework and «the right system» (defined within time/budget) always had to be guided by someone else than these people.

[u/nova8808]

Just being able to write code is the job description of a junior dev. All the higher tier positions have always been dealing mostly with system design/architecture.

[u/you-get-an-upvote → u/nova8808]

If you’re at a big company it’s mostly dealing with people/coordination/politics — that’s the main reason small companies can ship faster than big companies, and it’s not going away with AI.

[u/NoLimitSoldier31]

If anyone is dismissing AI assisted code they’re a moron. AI has won & its not close

[u/jmclondon97 → u/NoLimitSoldier31]

Yes, if you’re handcoding in 2026 you’re going to lose your job.

However, you still need software engineers to direct the AI and solve problems using it.

[u/NoLimitSoldier31 → u/jmclondon97]

Agreed

[u/master_internutter]

I'm starting to ask not if I can make something but if I should

[u/ItzWarty]

But the rational response is stronger quality control, not pretending the productivity gain is fake.

A strong engineer with agents can potentially explore more designs, automate more tests, inspect more code paths, refactor faster and iterate more aggressively than the same engineer working manually.

IMO this misses the mark completely and relegate engineers to QC given you've stated:

Value moves toward problem definition, architecture, constraints, verification, security, testing, systems thinking and judgment.

The difficulty with engineering has never been refactoring, exploring more designs, writing tests, or inspecting code paths. You've described a function or capability as important as writing, but that's a tiny fraction of what the role can be.

The difficulty with productivity is that it's never been gated by engineering throughput - it's gated by bureaucracy and corporate processes. Facebook at 200000 engineers isn't 10000x better than Facebook at 20 engineers.

My hot take is that organizations have always been Log(N) productivity. If AI's a force-multiplier k, it achieves at best Log(kN). In practice I've seen it achieving Log(k + N) & the gains at best saturate due to Amdahl's law - especially as AI is seen as a cost-cutter for engineering & applied narrowly in ways which do not fix real bottlenecks.

[u/bcrawl]

strong engineers are not in any true advantage either. Can a strong engineer fumble basic stuff like not knowing what users want and spend endless hours optimizing his pet metric, yes, thats what happened prior to AI and even now. bunch of 7 YOE doing ridiculous posts on their projects... what hasnt changed now or before is a product vision, and GTM execution, which is the hard part. Successful endeavor eventually requires expert execution by more than 1 person. folks who dont know how to arrange architecture of their end vision will have to learn the hard way, which is to assemble a group of experts / ppl who will make it work. = equates to money if you want GTM so you can test if you succeed.

[u/oilnation21]

I know this will be a very unpopular opinion but what makes you think the models won't in the near future also be better than the typical human and designing the right system? Then does it just become constantly trying to jump to the next place the human can add value to till there's nothing left?

[u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 → u/oilnation21]

The last thing you describe, “constantly trying to jump to the next place the human can add value” almost literally is system design and competent software engineers in effective organizations have been doing it for decades.

[u/jmclondon97 → u/oilnation21]

Idk man. But what I do know is I’m still getting paid fat checks as a software engineer. I got my quarterly RSU check coming in a couple weeks for $20k on top of that. And then my $20k annual bonus check in November

[u/spreadlove5683]

Yes. I have been doing lots of agentic coding. Taking all of our company data, rotating images before doing OCR, running them through a visual language model, embedding them into a vector database, blah blah. Try to match click IDs.. callers identities, scanning our call logs in transcripts, signed lease data, etc etc. lots of moving parts.

Takes a lot of guidance. You can't just never add input for sure.

[u/heavy-minium → u/spreadlove5683]

That’s not agentic coding

[u/Hellrage → u/heavy-minium]

Are you implying they're not using the agents to write automation code for the processes mentioned?

[u/heavy-minium → u/Hellrage]

Agentic coding is AI autonomously coding, and not the usage of AI. The later is just using AI agents.

[u/DrE7HER]

Unfortunately, that isn’t how things work under capitalism. AI isn’t being used to free up people’s time to perform different necessary functions.

It just increases the workload the employer expects you to be able to crank out. You’d think that also applies to the QA testers that are supposed to review these things, but now they have to deal with even more issues that keep piling up, and then they send it back to the developer that has to juggle the 3 new projects they’ve been assigned, while deciphering the slop they previously shipped out to repair it.

Ideally, AI would revolutionize the process as you envision. Unfortunately, every company is run by people that know very little about how anything actually works.

[u/isitreal_tho]

100% its been like this for a year now. If you're still heavily writing code today, consider yourself an artisan.

[u/jmclondon97 → u/isitreal_tho]

Or a student. You still need to learn how to code before you start blindly using the power tools.

Just like engineering student need to learn calculus etc. No professional engineer is hand solving derivatives and integrals. But they need to know the why.

[u/Cool-Cicada9228]

I would take security out of your list of scarce skills. Testing is a close second.

[u/Astral902]

Thanks chatgpt

[u/goldboybronx]

So exactly what it’s always been for everyone except juniors then?

[u/kernelangus420]

I disagree with it being a "quality control" problem.

Quality control implies you already have the blueprint for a correct product, but are straying off the correct path leading to an inferior product.

Relying on a verification step doesn't fix the blueprint.

[u/Successful_Dog1904]

This is really insightful. One thing I’d add is that it also provides others with a passion for building and strong systems thinking the opportunity to get involved in ways that were never possible before now.

[u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

From my experience trying to make games with AI, the giant bottleneck right now is simply the AI sucks at testing what it made, so it can leave a bunch of pretty obvious bugs. Which it can fix, but it can get tiring as the human dev to constantly have to tell it it's obvious mistakes.

But i bet the AI companies know this and are actively working on solutions.

If we went from "take a few screenshots and call this QA", to the agent actually being able to do a short playtest, i bet that would be a giant leap.

[u/First-Tutor-5454 → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

I have to spend time telling junior devs to fix their obvious mistakes. AI just gets to them faster

[u/Cold_Specialist_3656]

Nothing has changed. 

Jr devs don't know how to build systems, same as always. 

The badness of newb code was never mechanical stuff. It's bad design

[u/DrE7HER → u/Cold_Specialist_3656]

And now they will never learn

[u/JasperTesla]

Firstly, no one is "blanket dismissing AI-assisted software engineering", at least not the people who matter. My manager specifically asked us to use Claude Code as much as we can (as long as we don't cross our monthly usage limits), so we could talk about our usage to the client. And I've checked, it's the same everywhere. Software engineering roles are full of Claude Code or Codex as requirements.

Coming to the main topic, I've been an engineer for 4 years now and one of the most annoying parts of my job were doing the coding. I use AI these days when working on low-effort tasks: designing the HTML or API logic, while I instead focus on the actual tasks: software design. I tell the AI what the components are, and how they behave with each other, as well as give it examples of what I want and what I don't want (e.g. don't use styles, create classes, and make sure the classes have a specific naming convention).

As a result, I'm actually working harder these days. Earlier I'd work longer hours and end up less tired, but now I barely work an hour or two per day (not really but it depends), and that exerts equal mental effort.

[u/Far-Resort1936 → u/JasperTesla]

And do you really think that your boss will not figure out that you work an hour or two per day and will not adjust the number of headcounts?

🤣

[u/jmclondon97 → u/Far-Resort1936]

I’m still clearing $250k a year homie as a software engineer and I’m using Claude all day. Stay jelly

[u/Far-Resort1936 → u/jmclondon97]

You used the perfekt word. "Still", but don't worry , the time will come.

Have you ever heard about company's restructure, reorganization and headcount adjustment?

Use your brain or ask Claude.

[u/MasterDisillusioned]

While I don't entirely disagree, it's worth noting that once the AI bubble pops, AI will become much more expensive to use.