The Identity Crisis of Software Engineers

Something big and unsettling is happening in software engineering right now. Not dramatic enough to make headlines on its own, but persistent enough that I keep noticing it in conversations with colleagues, in forums, and increasingly in myself.

Software engineers are going through an identity crisis.

With AI coding assistants now a standard part of the workflow, many of us spend more time reviewing code than writing it. There are entire days where I write almost no code myself, and instead read hundreds of lines generated by an AI.

That sounds like a productivity gain. It is not that simple.

Reviewing AI-generated code is harder than writing code yourself. When you write, you hold the intent in your head. When you review, you have to reconstruct it, and then hunt for subtle bugs that a fluent but fundamentally pattern-matching system might have introduced. Eight hours of writing code is tiring. Eight hours of reviewing it is exhausting in a different, more draining way.

And yet, it still requires you to be very good at writing code. This is the paradox. Effective review demands deep expertise, arguably more than writing something yourself from scratch. Code review at this level has always been the domain of senior engineers, who have honed their skills over the years. AI has not removed that requirement; it has just moved it earlier and made it universal.

But many people entered this field because they love to write code. The satisfaction of cracking a hard problem, of watching something work because you designed and built it; that experience is increasingly replaced by a different kind of task. You do not solve the puzzle anymore. You verify the solution. That is not the same thing.

The lines-of-code metric used to be a flawed but real proxy for progress; something some engineers optimized for and felt proud of. It is now essentially meaningless.

There is also a profound shift in accountability. Before, when you reviewed code, the original author carried most of the responsibility for its behavior. Now the author is an AI that cannot be held accountable, which makes the reviewer the sole responsible party. More responsibility, less creative ownership.

Altogether, the profession has arguably become more tiring, more demanding, more accountable, and for many, less fun.

Personally, I find it more interesting. It pushes me toward questions I find more rewarding: not just how to build something, but what is actually worth building. That feels like a more human kind of problem.

If you are a software engineer, or aspire to become one: how do you see what is happening to our profession right now?