An engineer is someone who solves problems. The tools come after, and they change. Siege engines, steam, concrete, and for about fifty years, software.
Software was my main tool and not my first. Before code there was a garage: mechanics, wood, wiring, most of it from my father, a CNC machinist. Code came at seventeen, and for a decade it was all I needed, because the hard part of most problems was getting a machine to do the thing. Some of those years I wasn't solving anything. I was doing what I was told. That's a different job, and I'll come back to it.
That's over. The machine does the thing now, and anyone with a laptop and a clear sentence can have it done by the afternoon. The tech gap is closed.
I expected to mind more. I don't, and I think it's because code never felt permanent. Bosses counted thrown-away code as a week lost. It was the job working. There's always a lazier way to make a thing do what it was meant to do, so the job description was circular from the start: if you're not engineering yourself out of your own work, you're doing it wrong. AI ran that loop on the whole profession at once.
The "thought leaders" on LinkedIn and X have it nearly right. "There's still a need for software engineers." Right instinct, one word too many. There's still a need for engineers. Software was only the qualifier. The same crowd has "discovered" that you can't automate a process that wasn't working before you touched it, and they say it as if it arrived with the models.
The work was always four moves: take something vague, make it precise, build it, check it did what you meant. For ten years my loop ran in TypeScript. Now it runs in English and the moves haven't changed. Only the fourth got slower. A compiler answered in a second, CI in ten minutes, production in a day. A customer answers in a month, or not at all. English is just the next abstraction, and its compiler is a person. Getting an answer out of one is the step I'm worst at.
My loop has moved three times (maybe even more): software, software with an LLM in it, now a phone and a sentence. Somewhere in the last move I saw that "English is the new programming language" is true and one move short of the truth. No program starts at the code, or at the prompt. It starts at the vague thing, and the vague thing is always a person wanting something they can't say yet. The engineer's seat was always upstream of the language, where a want becomes a problem. That's where I'm trying to sit now.
So yes, ten years of skill is worth significantly less than it was. That's the real test. A bridge engineer who can only build in steel was a steel specialist with a better title. An engineer has always expected the material to change under him. It's the one thing the job promises.
And if the job was doing what was in front of you and waiting for the next ticket, this is the moment you will find out. No judgment. Companies built that job on purpose and paid well for it, and I did it for some of those years. But that job was the tool, and the tool is gone.
The definition of engineer hasn't moved. The definition of software engineer lost its first word.
Nine months into testing this on myself, the result isn't in. I can build anything now. Getting strangers to want it is a problem I haven't solved, in any language.
— Simon