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Is Software Engineering over as we know it?
Will AI break or make you?
This is a question I’ve been asked a lot, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot, too. I’ve been building software since I was 15; I started with the most straightforward HTML/PHP/MySQL website. I guess we’ve probably all been there. Then, I moved to macOS with Objective-C and AppKit and to iOS applications when the SDK was released. Now, it’s about Swift and SwiftUI.
Right now, I can deploy a backend and a frontend in a language I barely know, with a technology I learned about yesterday on Vercel, and have it online to millions of people the minute after. And I can do all this without thinking about the code itself.
You see, actively thinking about code might be a thing of the past. Well, not for everything, of course. But as Software Engineers and Designers converge to a new class of workers: Builders. Builders do not sit all day thinking about the best architecture or pattern to make this or that screen work. No, they use AI-assisted tools to think and build. It might be your new pen and paper, your new rubber duck, but tomorrow, it’ll probably be a new workflow entirely. Builders have a goal in mind, a product they want to make, a feature they want to ship, and they infuse every bit of their creativity with tools that assist them to make it real faster.
