Is Traditional Software Engineering Dead?
âDoes this mean that traditional software engineering is dead? Absolutely not. Software engineersâeven the ones who are not necessarily tuning or training AI modelsâthese are now among the most leveraged people on earth. Sure, the guys who are training and tuning models are even more leveraged because theyâre building the tool set that software engineers are using.
But software engineers still have two massive advantages on you. First, they think in code, so they actually know whatâs going on underneath. And all abstractions are leaky. So when you have a computer programming for youâwhen you have Claude Code or equivalent programming for youâitâs going to make mistakes.
Itâs going to have bugs. Itâs going to have suboptimal architecture. So itâs not going to be quite right. And someone who understands whatâs going on underneath will be able to plug the leaks as they occur.
So if you want to build a well-architected application, if you want to be able to even specify a well-architected application, if you want to be able to make it run at high performance, if you want it to do its best, if you want to catch the bugs early, then youâre going to want to have a software engineering background.
The traditional software engineer is going to be able to use these tools much better. And there are still many kinds of problems in software engineering that are out of scope for these AI programs today. The easiest way to think about those is problems that are outside of their data distribution.
For example, if they need to do a binary sort or reverse a linked list, theyâve seen countless examples of that, so theyâre extremely good at it. But when you start getting out of their domainâwhere you have to write very high-performance code, when youâre running on architectures that are novel or brand new, when youâre actually creating new things or solving new problems, then you still need to get in there and hand code it.
At least until either there are so many of those examples that new models can be trained on them, or until these models can sufficiently reason at even higher levels of abstraction and crack it on their ownâŠ
And remember: there is no demand for average. The average appânobody wants it, at least as long as itâs not filling some niche that is filled by a superior app. The app that is better will win essentially a hundred percent of the market. Maybe thereâs some small percentage that will bleed off to the second-best app because it does some little niche feature better than the main app, or itâs cheaper, or something of the sort.
But generally speaking, people only want the best of anything. So the bad news is thereâs no point in being number two or number threeâlike in the famous Glengarry Glen Ross scene where Alec Baldwin says, âFirst place gets a Cadillac Eldorado, second place gets a set of steak knives, and third place youâre fired.â
Thatâs absolutely true in these winner-take-all markets. Thatâs the bad news: You have to be the best at something if you want to win.
However, the set of things you can be best at is infinite. You can always find some niche that is perfect for you, and you can be the best at that thing. This goes back to an old tweet of mine where I said, âBecome the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.â
And I think that still applies in this age of AI.â