Software Engineering

My Prediction of the Software Engineering Landscape to Come The role of a software engineer is changing before our eyes. We’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how software gets built—one where the primary skill isn’t writing code, but rather directing intelligent agents that write code for us. This isn’t some distant future. It’s happening now. And it’s reshaping what it means to be a software engineer. The Rise of Spec-Driven Development Traditional software development has followed a familiar pattern: product requirements are translated into technical specifications, which engineers then translate into code. This two-step translation process—from business need to technical spec, then from spec to implementation—has been the core of our profession. ...

In software engineering, there is often a tension between the reality of discovery and the rigidity of a roadmap. We are frequently handed a destination and an arrival time before we’ve even had a chance to check the engine. Right now, my team is in the thick of a significant integration with a complex third-party platform. The technical requirements are heavy: our APIs need to interact with theirs, and we need to upload all our sponsored campaigns to their platform to begin experimentation. ...