It's inevitable, with every new generation of AI your ability to write code becomes less and less relevant.
The good news is that writing code was never the goal, it's just the medium that is - or used to be - the most efficient way of delivering value.
As AI evolves you need to shift your focus to two things:
- Making sure you absolutely dominate the new tools to write code and are very productive with them.
- Master the parts of the job which AI will have a much harder time beating humans.
Number 1 is straightforward, we are in a period of intense change, make sure you test the new models (looking at you DeepSeek), explore code editors and improve your prompting skills. Both Cursor and Windsurf have an agent mode that can autonomously navigate your codebase creating and editing files. I'm seeing many people that haven't played with it yet, if that's your case I recommend starting from that right now.
Number 2 involves a set of skills that the current AI technology can't do. Understanding demand, adapting to change, communicating effectively with stakeholders and peers and managing risk were always key differentiators of great engineers and they will continue to be for a long time. Engineers who think and act strategically will keep being relevant. They will continue to be the decision makers while they delegate the repetitive part of the job to AIs.
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Top comments (1)
Screw this! I didn't join IT to talk with people