I see all these comments here dunking on the article, but I have to say, I basically completely agree with all the points the author is making. I think there are different kinds of software engineers, and the author's point of view resonates with those of us that are mostly concerned with building tools, rather than products. At the end of the day, I need the tool to work so that it can be used to build other things. In that sense, coding is dead for me. Anything more than trivial few dozen line changes to the codebase is going to be done by claude. It will figure out the hidden dependencies and gotchas more carefully than I will on a given time budget. And for me, unit tests have always been an afterthought, so the fact that the agent will also add unit tests for its modifications means it's strictly more disciplined than I ever was. I've been at this for 25+ years, and had the fortune to be able to largely be a "cowboy coder" but those days are long gone.

I still love writing code myself, but as I use LLMs more, I'm realizing it's not really the coding I actually loved, it was the software architecture and up front design work. Once the structure and plans are laid out, writing the code is just mechanical, and I'm going to reach for an agent if I can. Of course, these days, I find myself asking claude for advice on architecture as well, but that is much less a deferral of responsibilities than asking for an audit or survey.