Coming for us first: why software engineers might be the lucky ones

It's a strange time to be a software engineer. Every new model release lands with this mix of excitement and dread. You watch the demo, you see what it can do, and there are two reactions happening at the same time. One is genuine thrill - the tooling is becoming incredibly good and it's getting better at a pace that's hard to believe even when you're living through it. The other is the quiet recognition that the thing getting better is coming for you.

I run a tech agency and a large part of our output is software engineering. These conversations are happening every week now, in my team and in every engineering team I know. How many engineers do you actually need to build a product now? How many will you need in a year? A significantly increasing percentage of code is AI-generated, teams are getting smaller, and the productivity gains aren't theoretical anymore. They're visible. The existential question isn't going away.

And I think it's worth being honest about the fact that there's probably a level of copium here. We're hoping that there's still a need for the experienced driver at the helm, that product owners aren't going to just open their laptops and one-shot product ideas into production. Maybe that's true. Maybe it isn't. We genuinely don't know.

Why they came for us first

It makes sense when you think about it. Software engineering is the bottleneck for building AI products - so of course you go after that first. Scratch your own itch. And there's an enormous amount of training data to work with. Decades of open source, GitHub, Stack Overflow. We've been making software for a long time and we built a lot of it. The knowledge base is massive.

So we're feeling the pressure more than most, probably more than any specific profession right now, along with copywriters and translators. It feels like we're taking the hit first.

But we've been here before

Machine code to assembly. Assembly to high-level languages. Procedural to object-oriented. Everything on servers, then everything in the cloud, then everything on mobile. Software engineering has been through constant reinvention for as long as it's existed. Each of those shifts felt seismic at the time. Each time, the engineers who adapted owned what came next.

This one feels bigger than all of them. I think that's probably true. But what's also true is that the real skill of a great software engineer has never been a particular syntax or a particular framework. It's the ability to pick up new tooling and leverage it quickly. Engineers spend hours every week learning new tools, new patterns, new approaches - not because something's gone wrong, but because that's just the job. Reinvention isn't a disruption to our work. It is our work.

What if being first is actually the advantage?

Here's the thought experiment I keep coming back to. When AI shifts its focus - and it will - to law, financial services, healthcare, consulting, all these other white-collar professions, do we think those practitioners are going to find it as easy to adapt? To learn new tools every few weeks, completely upend their workflows, rethink how they've delivered their work for the last 20 years?

I'm not saying they can't. But I do think there's something about the way software engineers are wired - or maybe trained is a better word - that makes us better equipped than most for exactly this kind of change. We've been doing it our entire careers. It's not comfortable, but it's familiar.

So maybe there's a version of the near future where we've already adapted and figured out our place by the time everyone else is being hit. And maybe part of our value shifts toward helping those people - building tools and products focused on their specific workflows, their specific problems. Because as good as the interfaces are getting, there's still a gap between what a chat window can do and what a real business actually needs. Understanding a business problem, understanding how people want to work, knowing that not every organisation can just pivot how they do everything overnight - that's a skill. So is looking at two solutions that both work today and knowing which one is going to cause problems six months from now.

The honest bit

This could all be wishful thinking. I'm aware of that. You can already do an awful lot as a non-engineer with a chat interface. The abstraction layer keeps getting better. Maybe the gap closes faster than any of us expect. Maybe the question of whether engineers have an advantage becomes irrelevant because the tools get so good that everyone adapts at the same pace regardless of background.

I don't know. And I think that's actually what makes this interesting. It's not a prediction. It's a question I keep sitting with, and the more I think about it the more I think it's a question worth asking.

Where I land

We don't know how this plays out. Nobody does. But if I had to bet on a profession that's equipped to adapt to whatever comes next, I'd bet on the one that's been doing it for decades. Not because we're special. Because we're practiced.

And if being first through this ends up giving us even a slight head start on everyone else - that's not nothing.