Software engineering has changed substantially in the past few months, and most people (including the majority of the software engineers) are still not paying enough attention!
One of the important components of software engineering is writing code. At a few places (including Bespoke), the way we "write" code now is very different (and evolving every day). The old ways of software engineering, like writing (and reading) in an IDE, copy pasting code on Google/ChatGPT etc, are pretty much out.
Instead, at the core of it are agents like Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI which write the code. And there is more to the tooling here. In fact, the terminology is also different. You have to understand how to create subagents, install/connect MCP servers, about memory, compaction, etc. There is no reference architecture, and even AI-native folks are struggling a bit. Andrej Karpathy brought this up recently in one of his posts as well, which struck a chord with the community.
Andrej Karpathy@karpathy
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become
5:36 PM · Dec 26, 2025 · 16.5M Views
2.62K Replies · 7.53K Reposts · 55.8K Likes
So, writing code by hand is mostly disappearing. Instead of writing code, you are orchestrating and directing the agents. As Roon from OpenAI put it, now we are just yelling at the agents all day long to do things.
roon@tszzl
right now is the time where the takeoff looks the most rapid to insiders (we don’t program anymore we just yell at codex agents) but may look slow to everyone else as the general chatbot medium saturates
5:21 AM · Sep 16, 2025 · 776K Views
158 Replies · 189 Reposts · 3.15K Likes
When I was at Google, I went through an internal process to acquire what’s called “readability” for Python. That meant the code I wrote was readable according to strict Google standards. And when someone wrote code to be checked in, and if it was reviewed by someone else who didn’t have readability, the submission would be blocked until someone like me approved for readability.
Now, code is being written that nobody ever reads (for the most part!). Readability is no longer a thing, whether you like it or not. As I said, the interface is evolving, and IDEs are actually becoming less relevant. In fact, Google spent a lot on windsurf, and I am left wondering if they timed this incorrectly.
It’s not just the tooling, terminology, and interface that have changed. The models and the agents themselves have become incredibly powerful. Recently, a Google principal engineer said that what it took their team a year to build was built by Claude Code in an hour (I don't have all the details here, but that was a viral post on X). Rohan Anil, a researcher at Anthropic, said that six years of his life’s work could be compressed into a few months of working with Claude Code. A lot of people think the inflection point is with Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2. Claude Code is writing the code for Claude code.
Learning these tools is one of those “alphas” hiding in plain sight: it’s an alpha for now, since all of this is just so new that the vast majority of people are sleeping on it.
2026 will look very different for software engineering.
A lot of us are learning on the fly here, and so I created a Slack community to exchange notes. It’s here.
Please forward this to someone you know if you found this useful!
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