The End of Determinism — What's Left for Engineers When AI Writes the Code · Tom Enden
A Treatise, in Three Parts · Wix Engineering 2026
The End of Determinism
What's left for engineers when AI writes the code
by Tom Enden
▶ Watch the talk<br>View the slides
During 2026, I shipped code that I don't fully understand. It was written in a programming language I'm not even fluent in. A year ago, this would have been a fireable offense. There's no way I would have stood on a stage at a Wix Engineering conference, my employers in the crowd, and said that sentence out loud. Last week, it was just another Tuesday.
And here's the part that's been keeping me up at night: I was proud of it.
That's a paradox, right? If someone else wrote it, I can't be proud of it. And if I'm proud of it, there's no way someone else wrote it. Except both parts of that sentence are true. And I think unpacking why tells us something important about what our job actually is now — and what it always was.
The Question We're All Avoiding
There's a feeling in the hallway of every major tech company right now. No one talks about it directly, but everyone feels it. It's the feeling of existential fear.
If AI writes all the code, what are you here for?
Is the job we spent decades perfecting — the craft we built our identities around — completely obsolete? Anyone who tells you they're not scared about this is probably lying. I feel it everywhere.
I want us to sit with that for a moment before jumping to reassurance. Because the honest answer is more interesting than either "you're fine, don't worry" or "yes, you're replaceable."
Our job has shifted in three fundamental ways. In each of them, there is still a massive difference between the engineers who will do extraordinary work and those who are, yes, probably replaceable. The difference is not what most people think.
Shift I · How We Write
From monologue, to dialogue.
§1
Not too long ago, writing code meant opening an editor and facing a blinking cursor. You were the only thinking participant in the room. Writing code was a monologue.
Now, writing code is prompting. It's iterating. It's pushing back. It's a conversation.
This may sound like a minor change in workflow, but it's not. It's actually a complete shift in cognitive mode. Dialogue is a fundamentally different mental activity from monologue — and we've known this for about 2,400 years.
Socrates never preached. He never wrote anything down. He walked around Athens asking people questions, listening carefully, and following the logic wherever it led. He saw his job as a midwife: helping others deliver ideas they already had inside them. He said he couldn't teach anyone anything — he could only make them think.
The Greek philosopher Socrates. He would have been extraordinary at Claude Code.
Here's the thing: not every chat is actually a dialogue. When you're in the state of mind of make this work, ship it, make it faster — you're not doing engineering. You're a customer dropping a car off at a mechanic. You're not engaged, not present, not thinking. That will not yield good results. That is not a dialogue by Socratic standards.
On the other hand, when you treat the machine as a peer and ask the real questions:
Not this —
"Make it work."
"Now make it faster."
"Ship it."
This —
"Why that approach over a simpler interface?"
"What are the assumptions underneath this logic?"
"What breaks if traffic is 10×?"
Then you're involved. You're pushing the software to actually become better. That's engineering.
The shift isn't just that you have a new tool. It's that you now need to be a good dialogue partner. That's a skill. It requires presence, curiosity, and the ability to hold a mental model of what you're building while simultaneously interrogating it.
Shift II · Authorship
Authorship is distributed. Ownership is not.
§2
git blame still points at me. But something about that answer doesn't feel quite right.
$ git blame src/auth/handler.ts
a3f7b2c1 (Tom Enden 2026-04-10) 1| export async function validate(
e91dc4f8 (Tom Enden 2026-04-12) 2| const decoded = await jwt.verify(
7c2ab09e (Tom Enden 2026-04-14) 3| if (!decoded.sub) throw new Auth…
In 1967, Roland Barthes wrote an essay called The Death of the Author. He wasn't talking about AI — he was talking about literature — but his core claim turns out to be remarkably literal: any text is a tissue of quotations. There is no original. There never was.
Roland Barthes · 1967<br>A text is a tissue of quotations.
— The Death of the Author
Think about how you write code. You use design patterns you learned from others. You pull ideas from Stack Overflow answers you absorbed years ago. You depend on libraries written by people you've never met. Authorship has always been distributed; the single author was always a convenient fiction. In the AI age, we just can no longer sustain it.
But distributed authorship doesn't mean distributed ownership. And this is where it...