The Last Software Engineer
The most durable skills you can develop
Let's wake up
Your brain needs this 🧠
Product engineering is the discipline of connecting implementation decisions to product consequences.
Product Engineer !== Product Manager
Your Tools
You
The work
The work
Your Tools
(agents)
You
What do you actually do here?
prompt engineering
context engineering
loops 🌀
queues
graphs 📊
sub agents
flow engineering
fine-tuning
*automated* prompt engineering
reasoning
agents
rag
vector databases
mcp
cli
vibe coding
skills
orchestration
computer use
I'm Tired
?
You are here
The work
Artificial General Intelligence
The work
(Almost) Artificial General Intelligence
The work
(Almost) Artificial General Intelligence
Y
o
u
What's happening
here?
Judgement
Product Engineering
Building the thing right is downstream of building the right thing.
[product engineers care about] customer experience and the commercials of the product. Not just tinkering with tech, but getting an outcome.
Wayne Allan
I got all these ideas, I'm gonna ship —
the agent's never gonna push back …
it's just gonna match your momentum.
…you're using [AI] to bring things for you to use your judgment on. So … give yourself as much information as you can to make a judgment.
Will King
Deciding what to build, I think I'll summarize it as just being curious … see what problems are there and just trying things out … prototyping and building things so you can feel what they do and also do they actually solve the problem for the users.
Ruben Casas
You just have to botch it enough times to know what works and what doesn't work.
…Judgment calls on what's high impact … get easier over time.
Dillon Mulroy
What to build, how to build it, when to build it — that is still our choice.
Customers don't have to deal with the consequences of being wrong.
Jack Ryan
…you own that feature, which means you might have to go and talk to a bunch of customers and understand how that feature that you're owning will ultimately impact things. And you might have to go talk to stakeholders and people that before you were just totally shielded from.
Lucas Wargha
What's different for me about a software engineer is that we have judgment that is informed by a particular kind of experience… knowledge of computer science… algorithms and architecture and the human issues.
Grady Booch
Code is the slow part for humans… We had to walk away from the binary. Then we had to walk away from the assembly language… And now we're going to walk away from the code.
Robert C. Martin
If you are evolving into that engineer… all of us as engineers become product people. We become architects… We have to think about what is this product supposed to be now? What is it supposed to be long term?
Grady Booch
I think that skills... may get replaced in six months. Who knows? But right now they're the best tool that we have to accelerate our agentic development process.
Ben Ilegbodu
What if I'm wrong?
You are here
Paul Buchheit
Kevin Systrom
Jan Koum
Drew Houston
Product Engineering: A hallmark of history's greatest Software Engineers
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
You
Resources
Thank you!
𝕏 @kentcdodds
The Last Software Engineer
By Kent C. Dodds
The Last Software Engineer
I'm not here to tell you software engineering is ending soon. Nobody can put a reliable date on that, and pretending otherwise is a distraction. But we also have to admit something humbling: a year ago, most of us would not have predicted coding agents would be this good. That should make us less confident about predicting what they'll be able to do one year, or five years, from now. So let's use "The Last Software Engineer" as a thought exercise. If AI keeps taking over more of the implementation work, what remains most human and valuable for us to do? In this talk, we'll take one step back from the hypothetical end and focus on the durable skill that has always separated great engineers from merely productive ones: judgment. The future belongs not to people who only know how to build, but to people who know what should be built. We'll talk about product engineering, accountability, trade-offs, constraints, evaluation, and how to keep making software worth having in an AI era.
