In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their company, but how much they…
The Future of Software Engineering Isn’t What You Think
Over the past two decades, I’ve watched software eat the world, then hardware catch up, then Generative AI reshape both at the same time…
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In …
Developer AI Token Costs Could Exceed Their Salaries in Two Years - Slashdot
"Enterprises may soon be paying as much for their developers' AI token usage as they do for their salaries," writes InfoWorld: According to Gartner, these costs will meet, or even exceed, the typical software engineer's monthly salary within the next two years. This is not only because developers ...
Resetting on engineering expectations in the age of AI
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You have to know how to drive the car
There are lots of different ways to be a software engineer. You can grind out code for twelve hours a day to make the world a better place. You can focus on glue work: process-based work that makes everyone around you more successful. You can join the conversation with your product manager and designer colleagues to influence what gets built, not just how it gets built. You can climb the ladder to staff engineer and above, or you can take it easy and focus on your hobbies. But whichever of these you choose, you have to know how tech companies work.
AI Is Quietly Changing Who Gets to Build Software
What If Universities No Longer Need Edtech Companies?
Note on 24th September 2026
The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking …
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Coding agents as normal technology
Software as Fast Fashion
Clothes have never been cheaper. These days a t-shirt is often cheaper than a decent cup of tea in a cafe. The wonders of capitalism. At least that is how it is often described. And when you point at the underpaid, gruesome labor that people in poorer regions of the planet have to do to […]
The New Software Lifecycle
I co-wrote a Google whitepaper about how AI is changing the software lifecycle. I'm not going to summarize the whole thing. Instead, here are the handful of ...
The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
On AI agents, grunt work, and the part of science that isn't replaceable.
Where is all the new, good software?
Here's a question we see, especially from AI skeptics: if AI coding is so great, shouldn't we be seeing more new, good software by now? Here are some answ...
Tests Are The New Moat | Daniel Saewitz
As AI becomes better at cloning people's open source work, what ends up becoming most valuable are software contracts, tests, and API surface area. This clashes the incentives of clearly defining your commercialized open source software with protecting it.
Don't Take the Black Pill - Andrew Kelley | SSW 2026