Comment by gipp
Comment by gipp 2 days ago
I see a lot of the same (well thought out) pushback on here whenever these kinds of blind hype articles pop up.
But my biggest objection to this "engineering is over" take is one that I don't see much. Maybe this is just my Big Tech glasses, but I feel like for a large, mature product, if you break down the time and effort required to bring a change to production, the actual writing of code is like... ten, maybe twenty percent of it?
Sure, you can bring "agents" to bear on other parts of the process to some degree or another. But their value to the design and specification process, or to live experiment, analysis, and iteration, is just dramatically less than in the coding process (which is already overstated). And that's without even getting into communication and coordination across the company, which is typically the real limiting factor, and in which heavy LLM usage almost exclusively makes things worse.
Takes like this seem to just have a completely different understanding of what "software development" even means than I do, and I'm not sure how to reconcile it.
To be clear, I think these tools absolutely have a place, and I use them where appropriate and often get value out of them. They're part of the field for good, no question. But this take that it's a replacement for engineering, rather than an engineering power tool, consistently feels like it's coming from a perspective that has never worked on supporting a real product with real users.
I'm not sure you're actually in disagreement with the author of this piece at all.
They didn't say that software engineering is over - they said:
> Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over.
You argue that writing code is 10-20% of the craft. That's the point they are making too! They're framing the rest of it as the "talking", which is now even more important than it was before thanks to the writing-the-code bit being so much cheaper.