Jordan, along with many others in various ways, has recently questioned the future of software engineers. Righfully so, given the amount of statements made by "BigAI" along with less direction observations from practitioners.
Hey, we don't often encounter systems which output code, do we? A system which can succintly and rapidlyreference all the popular programming languages, frameworks, libraries, documents.
It's only natural and healthy to ping-pong questions between our own role and the capabilities of said system. Introspection upon oneself is the first step to understanding and to building "taste", as a chef would say. Or as people explaining "vibe-coding".
On the surface, it's a label given to a set of responsibilities and skills. Sometimes it has an indication of seniority prefixed. The beauty is in the fluidity of elements inside this set, which can vary over time and between companies.
Establishing new titles takes time. Some of my favourite recent ones are Analytics Engineer, Growth Engineer, Product Engineer and Forward Deployed Engineer. All these have some base in previous titles, adapted to a new, ever-growing set of responsibilities, in a constantly expanding tech stack.
Unless the laws of entropy become drastically challenged, the role of an engineer as agents of order will always be present.
BigAI might very well aim to replace the current set of roles and skills, but side-effects will include shifts. The myriad of tools, foundation models, specialties, platforms, standards, data sources and world models will require more untangling than ever. Lists of "45 AI tools your company needs" should be a first warning sign.
As a teenager, I made some decent pocket money from a little newspaper listing I had, advertising for service of installing Windows XP, drivers and games. Part of me was happy to earn some money, another part was baffled why people couldn't follow simple, almost step-by-step instructions. It's mostly installation wizards, no? Part of my theory was that the happy path was easy, but edge cases, errors, exotic combinations of hardware were difficult to troubleshoot. Regular folk would rather delegate and pay a geeky teenager to sort all this out.
The spectrum of complexity widens, variety increases, combinations explode, like a prism splitting light into all the colours of the rainbow, and those colours splitting further, like a fractal.
Could a handful of entities make sense of EVERYTHING? Maybe.
As long as we don't completely delegate human or business intent to central entities, the need to make sense will always be present.
Just like tasks-to-be-done disappear. We no longer need lamplighters, switchboard operators, doffers, knocker-uppers, powder monkeys, soda jerks, or wool combers.
There was a time when the well paid, highly respected and influential job of Proctor was a brilliant career path. Charles Dickens had a particular fondness for the role.
To an extent, some proctors became supervisors of the town's moral guard. The entire set of responsibilities was re-shuffled, with the introduction of a new, state-sponsored role: the Police (The Metropolitan Police Force, 1829).
Tudor / 2026