I’m an asian guy who grew up in the bay area, went to UCLA, and became a software engineer at a big tech company in silicon valley. Naturally. At least i’m the only Michael Liu working at LinkedIn for now! It appears the next respectable step on this default route is to prompt the same models as everyone else. Software engineering has always been the practice of making hard things disappear. I got through school and made my (short) career off of these vanishing layers of difficulty. And agents have only accelerated that disappearance. As a consumer of these great technological advancements, it has been cool and concerning to see software engineering being abstracted out of software engineering as i continue to software engineer. Just use more tokens and ship more code! My output grows yet I feel smaller and smaller, and less in the loop. If writing code no longer defines my job what does? Certainly not writing more of it. Quantity is what machines are for. So if software becomes less like machinery, maybe I operate it more like the medium through which I exercise judgement. We are taught that code is neutral, objective, even polite and unopinionated. But a medium is none of those things. It carries the intentions of whoever shapes it, then shapes the people who use it. The core of it is that code makes people feel. And it even changes quickly in response to people’s reactions. The influence is obvious in product work, which is probably why i like to stay close to it. But it definitely exists lower in the stack too. Infra determines which ideas become practical enough to attempt. I believe it’s my responsibility to use that influence to make someone feel weird or productive or entertained or understood or make the big company more big money. For now, it is fun to remain a student of the things panning out in front of me. What an interesting time to be a software engineer
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