I used to build apps for the iPhone.
Software Engineers have repeatedly redefined their roles and vitality over the last 3 years. The need for visiting Stack Overflow went low as soon as ChatGPT could answer your syntax questions. We started with easier access to knowledge and ended up with a complete offloading of knowledge work in such a short time.
As AI made it possible for stuff to be built in a much more rapid manner, it also threatened the job security of many developers. What used to require a team of engineers suddenly stopped demanding manpower. What used to take months to be built can now be done in a couple of weeks.
Coding is no longer part of the work, and developers who used to take pride in their programming skills now have to redefine their presence in the room. The hottest new programming language is English, as Andrej Karpathy puts it.
What is your role in 2026?
This layer of abstraction requires you to become a Product Manager. The nitty-gritty can now be handled with agents; your responsibility is becoming less about technique and more about product.
Iteration is cheaper than ever, and that gives you the power to experiment with the features in your mind, expand on what you thought would be the limit of software development, and fix the hardest bugs.
Document-Driven Development
Agentic Engineering separates you from the details, and the only thing that you can do to avoid getting drawn into the mess built by a fast and intelligent entity is to document the entire process of building products/features and fixing bugs. This helps you minimize vagueness, set concrete expectations, and keep journals of workflow for future reference to ease scalability, maintenance, and improvement.
Final Note: Embrace The Generalist Mindset
You can build anything. There is almost negligible friction to building something with a new tech stack as long as you know what to build. There used to be a time when ideas were cheap, and execution was the moat. Today, execution is cheap for anyone willing to learn the basics and build with agents. Idea, on the other hand, has become the distinguishing factor in a time where anyone can ship what’s on their mind. Taste is your vitality now. You need to know what’s good, bad, and ugly.
