👨💻 More Than Builders: Redefining Engineering Impact with AI
How developers can stay relevant in a future beyond code. There's much more to do than that.
Let’s say at this point, I don’t buy-into AI replacing developers; at least for the forseable, and in our current form; rather we’re at the start of what I feel is an imperative from both sides; companies and us as developers.
A need to shift in where engineers’ most valuable competence lies; the skills we’ll need to be most impactful in orgs in a post-AI world, where code generation is not uniquely our superpower as knowledge workers.
The conversation around what the adoption of LLMs means to software development seems to shift every week with each new tool; a proliferation of AI founders describing futures where their AI ‘oversees’ or otherwise benevolently ‘assists’ the work of developers.
We can only speculate how useful AI generation and scaling of advanced apps will be in the medium term, having seen mostly rudimentary applications bootstrapped with AI.
Irrespective of to what extent maintainability; scalability of these apps is even a concern, the spectre of AI in our industry is clearly not going away and feels ever-more eerily proximal to our day to day.
We are forced to confront truths about what this means for us as creative, problem solvers.
Devs; Product leaders
Engineering skill has found its higher purpose. To become a new type of high-agency operator at any seniority.
Our orgs are looking to revise how to make best use of their engineers’ hard-learned technical insight as IC efficiency increases.
Less focused on code generation alone, we might act as advisors and user advocates, identifying what are valuable product bets in the first place, creating a product vision, and describing what a maintainable, technically robust product solution looks like.
‘Being an introvert’, the often cited reason developers ‘just want to code’ is not even antithetical to building these skills. ‘Introversion’, itself a potential superpower should not preclude us from caring deeply, engaging with humility and in my experience, some bravery in advocating for a culture of improvement; for our teams and users.
Product Engineers aren’t just builders; more strategic operators with a strong grasp of product-market fit, user experience, and system design.
With increased leverage and efficiency, we may start to see orgs enable those Engineers in delivery team structures and their accountabilities. They’ll become naturally compelled to revise outdated, learned org boundaries, guarded power structures and risk averse process, as the cost of iteration continues to drop while ability to ship means opportunity cost of delay rises.
Whether you decide to step up or not, developing these skills is going to become the sustainable strategy for advancing as Engineers in an AI era. Engineering may become more autonomous, placed among Product leadership.
In return, organisations can normalise close Product-Engineering collaboration, strong tech culture, direct connection to users. A culture of personal investment in building something truly great and all the downstream benefits that come with that.
Shipping is what realises value from our code, and from all the ceremony around it.
It’s where we get to see which of our bets paid off, and get the prize: The user feedback, to go again.
Some product organisations are not yet awoken to the opportunity of working in this way, instead making an expensive trade off between attempts at certainty with layered hand-offs, and shipping quickly; optimising for the former, while start-ups and challengers might more easily optimise for the latter.
And not just because of AI. It always made sense.
AI will just accelerate this shift, to re-imagine what it means to be a Software Engineer and the impact available to us to find meaning in our work, and the competitive benefit to organisations.
I feel this will continue as engineers can do more with less, iterate quickly, and step into Product-leadership, influence and higher-order design challenges unique suited to humans.
.