The Last Software Engineer
The most durable skills you can develop
Let's wake up
Your brain needs this š§
product
consequences
Product engineering
implementation
decisions
what would be useful given this system, this cost, these risks, and these constraints?
product
decisions
Product management
user/business
needs
what would be useful given these users, this market, this business model, and these priorities?
Your Tools
You
The work
The work
Your Tools
(agents)
You
What do you actually do here?
prompt engineering
context engineering
loops š
queues
graphs š
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 ā
the agent's never gonna push back ā¦
it's just gonna match your momentum.
ā¦you're using [AI] to bring things for you to use your judgment on. So ā¦ 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 ā¦ see what problems are there and just trying things out ā¦ 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.
ā¦Judgment calls on what's high impact ā¦ get easier over time.
Dillon Mulroy
What to build, how to build it, when to build it ā that is still our choice.
Customers don't have to deal with the consequences of being wrong.
Jack Ryan
ā¦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 experienceā¦ knowledge of computer scienceā¦ algorithms and architecture and the human issues.
Grady Booch
Code is the slow part for humansā¦ We had to walk away from the binary. Then we had to walk away from the assembly languageā¦ And now we're going to walk away from the code.
Robert C. Martin
If you are evolving into that engineerā¦ all of us as engineers become product people. We become architectsā¦ 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
capturing got easy
taste didnāt
math got cheap
interpretation didnāt
autopilot flew more
accountability still matters
transactions got automated
advice and trust didnāt
You got this
We got this
Thank you!
š @kentcdodds