Thomas Ricouard: Is Software Engineering Over as We Know It?

Writing code has always been a means to an end, especially in my case, where my goal is to build and ship products to millions of users. What’s really happening is a shift in focus: away from obsessing over syntax and structure and toward building, iterating, and solving problems faster than ever before. The best engineers won’t be the ones who write the most code — they’ll be the ones who know how to wield AI to create, adapt, and push boundaries.

I very much disagree with the premise that “The best engineers won’t be the ones who write the most code” because it gives a false impression of what a great developer really is. Measuring a developer’s skill and value by how many lines of code they deliver is a terrible metric. The best developers I know are thinkers and have a product-oriented mindset. Sure, solving complex problems is a valuable skill, but there is so much more that goes into being a valuable member of a development team. How do you build something that will scale? How do you write code today that will be easy to maintain in the future (likely by other people)? How do you implement a feature in a user-centric way? How do you communicate with product and other stakeholders? How do you work as a teammate?

But I do agree with the notion that the future of development will shift based on what these tools allow. Time with your hands on a keyboard are important, but so much of development work is thinking about problems so that the coding part of your job is simply implementing solutions to those problems. As someone who recently launched an app that was written with heavy amounts of assistance from an AI coding parter in Cursor, I can tell you that a ton of my time was dedicated to understanding my app, understanding my users’ needs, and understanding what was going wrong when I had bug or bad user experiences. The AI assistant made it so I often didn’t need to type out every line of code myself, but I’m still doing the work.

Modern coding languages have abstracted away much of what older developers considered core skills (“let the OS manage my memory? What am I, a baby?”), and I think that AI tools are going to change how developers work, how much “busywork code” can be automated and implemented quicker, and will make it so that more people can be “developers” and solve their own problems.