When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com · 3,315 words · saved by 1 readers
No longer a hypothetical question, this is a mega-trend set to hit the tech industry
This winter break was an opportunity for devs to step back from day-to-day work and play around with side projects – including using AI agents to juice up those half-baked or incomplete ideas. At least, that’s what I did with a few features I’d meant to build for months, but didn’t get around to during 2025: related to self-service group subscriptions for larger companies, and my custom-built admin panel for The Pragmatic Engineer. Unexpectedly, LLMs like Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 did amazing jobs on the mid-sized tasks I assigned them: I ended up pushing a few hundred lines of code to…
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