Software engineers aren't being replaced by AI. But the job is shifting fast—from writing code to orchestrating systems, making decisions, and shipping outcomes.
Jason Corbett
Founder, FELTLAB
I used to spend most of my day writing code. Now I spend most of it deciding what to build and reviewing what AI wrote.
That's not a complaint. It's the biggest shift in software engineering since we stopped writing assembly.
Every generation of tooling abstracts away the layer below. Assembly gave way to C. C gave way to Python. WordPress meant you didn't need to hand-code a blog. Each time, people predicted fewer developers. Each time, we got more—because cheaper software creation meant more things were worth building.
AI is the next abstraction layer. O'Reilly's Tim O'Reilly recently made this exact point: we're not seeing the end of programming, we're seeing the end of programming as we know it. The pattern is identical to every previous shift.
But this one moves faster.
In my day-to-day building prototypes, the shift looks like this:
Less time writing boilerplate. AI handles the repetitive stuff—API integrations, CRUD operations, standard patterns. What used to take a day takes an hour.
More time on architecture and decisions. The hard part was never typing code. It was knowing what to build and how the pieces fit together. That's now the entire job.
Reviewing replaces writing. I read more code than I write. Understanding what AI produced, catching subtle bugs, ensuring it fits the broader system—that's the skill that matters now.
Context is the new currency. Stack Overflow's Charity Majors nailed it: it still takes years to forge a competent engineer. AI doesn't shortcut the judgement you need. It shortcuts the typing.
The developers struggling right now are the ones who defined themselves by code output. Lines written. Tickets closed. If that's your metric, AI just devalued your work.
The ones thriving define themselves by outcomes. Working software in users' hands. Problems solved. Decisions made well.
This is why I built FELTLAB around short sprints—two to three weeks from concept to working prototype. The value was never in the volume of code. It was in translating a founder's vision into something real, fast. AI just made that faster.
If you're sitting on an idea and waiting for the "right time" to build it, the role of software engineering just changed in your favour. Let's talk.
If you're thinking about rapid prototyping, AI integration, or need to ship working software fast, let's talk about how a FELTLAB Sprint can help.
