The New Software Engineer Is a Systems Manager
AI writes functions. That part is no longer impressive.
A few years ago, watching a large language model generate a working API endpoint felt magical. Today, it is baseline reality. Provide a well-structured prompt, some repository context, and a few reference files, and a model will reliably output a controller, a database migration, an integration test, a Dockerfile, or a polished React component. It can even spin up the initial architecture of a lightweight application.
This capability is incredibly useful. But it is not the job.
The critical mistake many industry observers—and technical teams—are making is confusing code generation with software engineering. They are fundamentally different disciplines.
