Burkov: Software engineering will evolve, not die — 90% of coders will stop hand-writing code
burkov · x · 2026-09-07
Andriy Burkov, author of The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book, lays out his take on AI's impact on software engineering in a long thread: the field will evolve, not disappear.
Key points:
- Code review mostly dies, surviving only in high-stake domains (banking, aviation, health, infrastructure) where correctness must be proven.
- The bottom 90% of coders stop hand-writing code — but will ship more, not less, since managers won't vibe-code themselves (too expensive, doesn't scale).
- The remaining 10% use AI for two kinds of code: one-off format-conversion (validate the result, not the code) and screen-size readable code that humans actually read, fix, and iterate on.
- Architects still design module dependency graphs and must keep foundations: CS, cloud, databases, security, parallelism, complexity, ML. UX still owns ergonomics and experiment design.
- Takeaway: the era of narrow specialization is over; understanding fundamentals matters more than ever — hence his ongoing textbooks and self-education platform.
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