@adlrocha - How AI Is Redefining Software Engineering
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@adlrocha - How AI Is Redefining Software Engineering<br>From Coder to Agent Manager: how I stopped writing code by hand after more than a decade of daily practice.<br>adlrocha<br>May 24, 2026
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After the detour we made the last few weeks exploring the state of the hardware and software stack of local AI inference, I want to come back to one of the topics I promised to address in my posts about agent engineering. In this post I want to try to answer a question that I’ve been asking myself since the last time I wrote a line of code by hand. This is a question that I feel has been bugging everyone in the tech sector in the last few months: how is the role of software engineers changing in the age of LLms, agents, and wide-spread intelligence?<br>Let me share my view on the matter.<br>How I got here
My relationship with AI coding tools has gone through different phases in the past year and a half. I think it is worth sharing my personal journey because I suspect most of you may have gone through similar phases.<br>My first phase in this journey was the “LLM as a rubber duck” phase. When ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude came out, I’d paste in some code, describe a problem to the model, and argue with it until I’d figured out what I actually wanted to do and the right architecture for it. It was great for brainstorming and the research phase .<br>In terms of code generation, at this point I still was writing the code by myself (that means actually typing it line-by-line like we were used to doing in the previous century). I was treating LLMs as a glorified StackOverflow. They were great at generating code snippets and ideas about how to implement something, but you couldn’t trust them to write full features that you could just copy-paste into your code base. It was a great knowledge base and a peer to discuss and think out loud.<br>Then Github Copilot and Cursor entered the scene. I honestly never adopted the tab-tab-tab approach that most people got so hooked to. What I found most useful in this phase was the ability to have an IDE companion in the same interface with whom I could chat about code and ask for suggestions and ideas with all the context loaded into it without me having to copy-paste code into a web textbox. In this phase, I was still writing most of the code by hand.<br>Then, around November last year, something completely changed.<br>Agents like Claude Code and Github Copilot’s agent mode were already around Summer of last year, but after trying them for a bit I wasn’t impressed, and my immediate reaction was of pure scepticism. Why would I want to use these agents if the code they were generating was sloppy? There were two things that really bothered me: I felt like I was losing track of my own codebase, and the code the agents produced didn’t feel like mine. It was correct in a generic sense as the code compiled and did what it was supposed to do, but it didn’t reflect the architecture decisions I’d made, best practices, the tradeoffs I’d considered, the reasons certain things were the way they were. TL;DR, it didn’t read as high-quality production code.<br>Christmas of 2025 was the inflection point for me. Everyone was talking about the new version of Sonnet and how crazy the improvement of quality of Claude Code’s output was. As many others, I used the quietness of Christman to take Claude Code for a spin again with a side-project that I had been looking to revive for a while, and I literally was blown away. To me it felt like overnight Claude Code was able to create high-quality code that I could have easily written myself (maybe because I am not a good coder, but still). For the first time I wouldn’t have been able to recognise code written by me from code written by an LLM.<br>From there on, my relationship with LLMs and how I think about my role as an engineer has changed completely. I stopped trying to supervise every line of code or trying to re-write it myself, and started focusing on what I was actually better at: the spec, the architecture, the judgement about whether the right thing was being built at all, going deep into the technical side of things. The agent handled the mechanical translation from intent to code and I was just focusing on the high-stakes logic and steering the agent towards the right solution while reviewing that the output was correct.<br>It is hard to admit it, but after more than a decade writing code by hand, for the first time I wasn’t typing the code I shipped myself. I was unexpectedly being “promoted” from an IC to an agent manager.
Software engineering is already changing
The clearest signal that engineering work has already changed isn’t anyone’s opinion, it’s visible in the source code of the tools we’re building with. I feel like the way we are building coding agents these days reflects the shape that software will have everywhere in the new future.<br>Karpathy’s LLM OS framing is no...