In a world where AI writes more and more of the code, is it crazy to still want to be a software engineer? My answer is no. I think there will still be a reasonably large number of engineers in the future, and some of them will be incredibly well paid.

I’m not necessarily saying there will be more of them than there are today. But if you’re an engineer (or whatever the future version of the job ends up being called) and you know how to build high-quality systems that solve real needs, you’re going to be very valuable.

Two things seem likely to me, and both are already visible if you look at how other industries have evolved.

Software will follow Jevons paradox

Jevons paradox is the observation that as something gets more efficient, we tend to use more of it, not less. William Stanley Jevons noticed that when James Watt dramatically improved the steam engine, factories ended up burning more coal, not less. Cheaper power meant factories could produce more, businesses expanded their operations, and total coal consumption went up.

It’s very likely that coding is going to get a lot cheaper. That means we’ll likely end up with far more software than exists today as it becomes cheaper and more possible to build. For example, every family might end up with its own custom app for running the household, or you might see every company customize their internal tools way more. Will professional software engineers be needed for all of this software? Probably not all of it, especially as it becomes easier and easier to write and maintain. But generally when markets expand, the need to have someone managing at least some of that software becomes pretty high.

The other thing that I’ve noticed is that as things gets more efficient, the distribution of the thing tends to get broader and luxury goods tend to appear. More efficiency means more choice, and people sort themselves across the premium and the economy ends of the market.

• Fashion. Most people can now afford a closet full of shirts and shoes. In the 1800s you used to only own a few pieces of clothing, but now manufacturing scale has made pretty much all clothes incredibly cheap. That has allowed the development of ultra-high end clothing: handmade suits, $200+ merino wool t-shirts, $5k+ jackets, etc.
• Air travel. Similarly, as planes got more efficient over the decades, the cost of a ticket dropped precipitously and more people fly than ever before. But at the same time, the distribution of what it looks like to fly is wider than ever before. We now have basic economy seats where you can’t bring a carry on. But you also have first class suites and private jets. There’s much more dispersion than ever before.

I think software engineering will play out the same way. You’ll have a lot more software than there used to be, and you’ll also have a high end that is far higher end than it ever was. The handful of people who still know how to build hardened production software, systems that scale to massive levels of compute, stay reliable, and get the tradeoffs right, will be even more in demand than they are today. The middle falls away and you get a bimodal distribution, much like air travel: either you’re paying tens of thousands of dollars for the first-class or private experience, or you’re in economy.

Engineers will orchestrate more

The other shift is in actual job that will be done by engineers. I recently read what pilots actually do on a 14-hour flight, which is a fascinating corollary to what I think will happen in software.

In commercial flights, the autopilot handles the flying of the plane on basically the entire flight, and the pilots physically fly the plane for only takeoff and landing. But the pilots’ main jobs have shifted to handling communication with air traffic control, managing flights paths to look out for weather and turbulence, and handling contingency planning to develop a safe backup plan for each scenario. Arguably this is something that pilots could do before, but they’re likely much better now that it’s their main focus. Notice too that the job has switched from a in-the-zone, focused task of flying the plane to something that is much more interrupt and monitoring based.

This is roughly what I expect for software engineers as the act of writing code keeps getting automated.

There are a lot of articles making this case, but the general thesis is that engineers will spend their time on everything in the stack other than the pure implementation: the product requirements, the design, overseeing the implementation, making sure there’s enough testing, the rollout, the maintenance, talking to customers.

We’ve seen this type of morphing happen before. In an interview with Cursor’s co-founder, Simon Eskildsen (creator of Turbopuffer and Logrus, and a deeply skilled infrastructure engineer) describes how in the early 2010s you started to see DevOps engineers emerge: people who could both SSH onto a machine and write configuration. Before that, ops was its own role, people who managed the servers but didn’t write code. Over time that blended into what we now call production engineering: people who can code but also have deep expertise in Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS/GCP, observability, and logging. Now you don’t need as many people handling your devops, but the people who you still do need are way more valuable.

I think the generalist engineer is about to go through a similar morph, just pointed in a different direction of some hybrid of engineer, product manager, and designer. The deep implementation skill hopefully won’t disappear, but it stops being the whole job.

So will the future be good?

I think there will be some ways in which the future is nicer, and other ways that will be extremely unfun.

The future will be great because access to really custom software will likely get democratized. It’s going to be easy to have software that conforms much more exactly to what you specifically are looking for, and you’ll be able to build a lot of it yourself. The quality of life should keep climbing now that software can become more specifically built for you. I’m excited for things like access to better health information and much more customized health diagnoses that accessible much more readily. I’m also excited for much easier ability to talk across different languages as compute and translation become easier to put into devices.

At the same time, the future might not be as fun because I think we’ll keep seeing stratification and a steadily rising Gini coefficient. The goods that are rival and zero-sum (housing in the places people want to live, access to really high quality education, etc.) derive their value from scarcity, so they don’t get cheaper as everything else does. They tend to do the opposite usually as a few people accumulate more wealth, which seems very likely in a world with more, cheaper software.

So, the future will see a lot of change. I think the base layer of life will keep getting better and more customizable, while the scarce, positional stuff will keep getting harder to reach.