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.
"Talking" here doesn't literally mean talking. It means figuring out the scope of the problem, researching solutions, communicating with stakeholders, debating architecture, building exploratory prototypes, breaking down projects - it's all the stuff that isn't writing the code.
I've worked at various sizes of organization. Most notably I joined Eventbrite when they were less than 100 developers and stayed while they grew to around 1,000.
> Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over.
Simon I guess vb-8558's comment inn here is something which is really nice (definitely worth a read) and they mention how much coding has changed from say 1995 to 2005 to 2015 to 2025
Directly copying line from their comment here : For sure, we are going through some big changes, but there is no "as it has been done for decades".
Recently Economic Media made a relevant video about all of this too: How Replacing Developers With AI is Going Horribly Wrong [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts0nH_pSAdM]
My (point?) is that this pure mentality of code is cheap show me the talk is weird/net negative (even if I may talk more than I code) simply because code and coding practices are something that I can learn over my experience and hone in whereas talk itself constitutes to me as non engineers trying to create software and that's all great but not really understanding the limitations (that still exist)
So the point I am trying to make is that I feel as if when the OP mentioned code is 10-20% of the craft, they didn't mean the rest is talk. They meant all the rest are architectural decisions & just everything surrounding the code. Quite frankly, the idea behind Ai/LLM's is to automate that too and convert it into pure text and I feel like the average layman significantly overestimates what AI can and cannot do.
So the whole notion of show me the talk atleast in a more non engineering background as more people try might be net negative not really understanding the tech as is and quite frankly even engineers are having a hard time catching up with all which is happening.
I do feel like that the AI industry just has too many words floating right now. To be honest, I don't want to talk right now, let me use the tool and see how it goes and have a moment of silence. The whole industry is moving faster than the days till average js framework days.
To have a catchy end to my comment: There is just too much talk nowadays. Show me the trust.
I do feel like information has become saturated and we are transitioning from the "information" age to "trust" age. Human connections between businesses and elsewhere matter the most right now more than ever. I wish to support projects which are sustainable and fair driven by passion & then I might be okay with AI use case imo.
When we say generating code is only a small percentage, that does not imply that the rest is just talking. Simon, you were part of a relatively small fast moving project in Django and the news website it powered, with from I understand a pretty small team. Have you worked as part of a team of 10, 20, 100, 1000 engineers? It's different.