Software Engineers Aren't Obsolete: Engineering Remains the Meta-Skill in the AI Era
dotey · x · 2026-09-12
Responding to "software engineers only write code" takes, dotey argues engineering skill remains a cross-domain meta-ability in the AI era.
- Code is just an intermediate artifact; real work includes abstracting requirements, catching AI bugs tests miss, and production stability/security
- Domain experts can now vibe-code demos, but shipping products still demands handling edge cases, scale, security and cost
- Knowing AI is itself an engineering discipline — context engineering, evals, agent orchestration — best learned by those with engineering backgrounds
- Domain knowledge is explicit and learnable; engineering intuition from practice is the harder-to-replicate asset
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