When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?
The Pragmatic Engineer surveys experienced engineers, including Google's Jaana Dogan, Vercel's Malte Ubl, DHH and Andrej Karpathy, who report that late-2025 model releases such as Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 crossed a capability threshold, with some now committing almost entirely AI-generated code. The article argues software engineering remains alive but shifts: prototyping, language polyglotism and stack specialization lose value, while tech-lead traits, testing and test infrastructure, architecture decisions, product-mindedness and reliability, performance and security skills gain importance. It also warns of more code, more tech debt, weak practices hurting sooner and a tougher work-life balance, and predicts product management and engineering will overlap more.