If, after reading the first five posts, you think this is a farewell ceremony for software engineering, with engineers about to lose their jobs , think again.

Whenever revolutionary automation tools have appeared throughout history, prophets and the media have always been unable to resist saying, “Such-and-such is going to disappear; such-and-such is going to become unemployed.” But seventy years have passed, and these predictions have almost never come true.

When Fortran appeared, the priests of assembly language were told they were finished; when VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet in history, was born , Wall Street declared that accountants were no longer needed.

What happened? Demand for accountants multiplied several times over. They simply stopped spending all day adding up ledgers by hand and became financial analysts who helped steer businesses.

Economics has a famous concept called “Jevons paradox ”: when the efficiency of using a resource surges and the cost of production plummets, total consumption does not shrink. Instead, it expands wildly by orders of magnitude.

The same is true of AI and code.

As AI drives down the marginal cost of generating code, humanity’s ambition to build complex software systems will also expand at ten times the speed—and go beyond what came before.

So the crisis has never been that the tools are too powerful. It is that we mistake “incidental implementation” for “the essence of engineering.”

In his landmark 1987 essay “No Silver Bullet ,” Turing Award winner Fred Brooks made this point long ago: AI eliminates only the “accidental difficulties” of looking up APIs, typing parentheses, and formatting. But the “essential difficulties” of dealing with real-world exceptions, security, surprises, and state will always remain, waiting to be solved.

Defining a system’s defensive boundaries, balancing technical debt against performance, and imposing order on chaotic business requirements… these essential complexities have always been the exclusive domain of human thinkers.

Do not listen to the marketing pitch that “everyone is an engineer,” and do not fear the apocalyptic funeral bell proclaiming that “engineers are dead.” Do not let marketing rhetoric stoke your anxiety, but neither should you turn a blind eye to technological progress.

The priests never disappeared. They simply changed names.

The next golden age of software engineering, belonging to true thinkers, is only just beginning…