[AlanClifford]

AI will reshape software engineering, but it won’t eliminate it. The boring stuff, such as coding, routine QA, and documentation, is bounded and pattern-heavy, so AI will eat that first.

The real bottleneck has never been typing. It’s figuring out who the stakeholders are, what they need, and why. That’s messy, political, and brutally hard to automate. For most products, the critical work is defining the problem, not writing the solution.

That kind of work requires soft skills, requirements engineering, deep domain knowledge, and prompt engineering. It’s also much harder to outsource, because deep language and cultural awareness are critical.

If you want to future-proof your career, focus on being really good at understanding and defining the problem to be solved.

[bigwheels]

> The real bottleneck has never been typing. It’s figuring out who the stakeholders are, what they need, and why. That’s messy, political, and brutally hard to automate. For most products, the critical work is defining the problem, not writing the solution.

The fewer employees you have, the less politics will get in the way. Then the quicker the business can execute.. especially as the cost of producing product continues to approach 0.

Most roles can be automated, I've been thinking of a real B2B platform enabler which optimizes for AI to negotiate the best deals with other AIs. But over time, I think even this will become trivial for GPT-6, 7, etc.

[ALostEngineer]

This was outstanding- thank you!