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Coming out against clickbait in 2026 isn’t exactly a brave and powerful stance, I get it. However, I do see teachable moments here, through the lens of General Semantics indexing:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe end of software engineers.\u201d<\/p>\n
All software engineers?<\/p>\n
Backend?
\nFrontend?
\nEmbedded?
\nSafety-critical?
\nInfrastructure?
\nSecurity?
\nData?
\nML?
\nFirmware?
\nSystems?
\nEnterprise integration?<\/p>\n
In every country?<\/p>\n
At every company?<\/p>\n
At every level of experience?<\/p>\n
By what date?<\/p>\n
And what exactly has ended?<\/p>\n
Writing code?<\/p>\n
Designing systems?<\/p>\n
Debugging?<\/p>\n
Understanding requirements?<\/p>\n
Making tradeoffs?<\/p>\n
Integrating unreliable components?<\/p>\n
Maintaining legacy systems?<\/p>\n
Deciding what the software should do?<\/p>\n
You have taken a profession containing thousands of different tasks and compressed it into one noun:<\/p>\n
software engineer<\/p>\n
Then you took a changing distribution of tasks and compressed that into one event:<\/p>\n
the end.<\/p>\n
Very clean sentence.<\/p>\n
Very dirty map.<\/p>\n
Perhaps AI reduces the amount of hand-written code required for some tasks.<\/p>\n
Perhaps one engineer can do work that previously required several.<\/p>\n
Perhaps junior hiring changes.<\/p>\n
Perhaps some specialties shrink while others grow.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the job becomes more about specification, verification, architecture, integration, and judgment.<\/p>\n
Those possibilities deserve investigation.<\/p>\n
But none of them logically equals:<\/p>\n
THE END OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERS.<\/strong><\/p>\n A useful Korzybskian translation:<\/p>\n \u201cCurrent AI tools appear capable of automating portions of software-development work, which may change the number and kinds of engineers some organizations hire.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Less satisfying.<\/p>\n No tombstone.<\/p>\n No apocalypse.<\/p>\n Also much closer to something one could actually test.<\/p>\n RW Coming out against clickbait in 2026 isn’t exactly a brave and powerful stance, I get it. However, I do see teachable moments here, through the lens of General Semantics indexing: \u201cThe end of software engineers.\u201d All software engineers? Backend? Frontend? Embedded? Safety-critical? Infrastructure? Security? Data? ML? Firmware? Systems? Enterprise integration? In every country? At every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":363,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions\/363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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