A third piece, after "What's left when the machine writes the code" and "How to start when the machine writes the code." Those were arguments about engineers in general. This one is just about me.
I have written twice now about what AI means for software engineers: what stays valuable when the machine can write the code, and how someone starting out can build those things. This time I want to be concrete and personal, because something specific changed in my own work this year, and it is not the thing people usually talk about.
The headline is not that I type faster, though I do. It is that the list of projects worth starting got much longer. There is a whole category of project that used to be automatically off my list, not because I did not want to do it, but because the cost was obviously higher than the payoff. AI lowered that cost. And when you lower the cost of building, you do not simply do the same things faster. You start things you would never have started at all. Three of those came off the shelf for me this year. One was too big. One needed a skill I do not have. One was too small to ever justify the time.
The one that was too big: WordPress.
For more than fifteen years, HikaShop (an ecommerce solution I started more 15 years ago) ran only on Joomla. A common request I got was some version of "will this work on WordPress?", and for years my honest answer was no. Not out of stubbornness, but arithmetic. WordPress has a different API, a different templating system, a different plugin model, a different idea of almost everything. Supporting it looked like rewriting fifteen years of mature, battle-tested code from scratch, and a small team does not have those years to spend. So it sat on the shelf, indefinitely.
