A eulogy for the software engineer

TL;DR Dev published a eulogy for the software engineer, and it reads less like a memorial service than a wake for an old workflow. The central claim is simple: AI didn’t just speed up coding, it changed what the job feels like, who gets to be an expert, and how much of the work still belongs to the person whose name is on it.

The piece opens with a writer who learned to code almost two decades ago without a computer science degree, through Google, forums and Stack Overflow. That history matters to the argument. In the old model, the field rewarded people who could teach themselves, take things apart and learn in public. The door was open because knowledge was passed around freely. Now, the author says, the same openness that built the field has also helped train the systems reshaping it.

The strongest section is the one that treats familiar developer gear as funeral objects: headphones, notebook, keyboard. Each one stands for a skill that used to define the craft. Headphones meant disappearing into the problem until the code gave up. The notebook meant sketching the system before building it. The keyboard meant the person who typed the code was the source of truth. The argument is that AI has not erased those skills, but it has moved them earlier in the process and made them less visible.

There’s a practical example tucked into the middle: the author merged 3,000 lines of code into a command-line tool at Mux without reading them line by line, because the work had already been defined months earlier in the notebook. Seventeen commands appeared in a pull request under the author’s name, but the real job was checking whether the result matched the plan and a live Mux account. That’s the new shape being described here: model the work, write down the rules, then review the output rather than hand-author every line.

And the essay keeps pushing on one point. The thing being buried is not software engineering itself, but the belief that the hard way was the only real way. The author says the old habits still matter, just turned up louder: better habits ship faster, bad habits fail faster, and taste still belongs to the human. The casket isn’t the end of the profession. It’s a warning that the job now lives somewhere else.