The Last Software Engineer
The most durable skills you can develop
Your Tools
You
The work
The work
The work
Your Tools
(agents)
You
What do you actually do here?
What do you actually do here?
prompt engineering
context engineering
loops 🌀
queues
graphs đź“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
?
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?
Product Engineering
A recovering software implementation educator
Hi, I'm Kent C. Dodds
What a product engineer
looks like...
Think in primitives
Think in primitives
Think in primitives
Make data-driven decisions
Make data-driven decisions
Understand / design the system
Understand / design the system
Understand / design the system
Think about sustainability
Think about sustainability
Think about sustainability
Think about sustainability
What if I'm wrong?
You are here
Product Engineering: A hallmark of history's greatest Software Engineers
Product Engineering: A hallmark of history's greatest Software Engineers
Margaret Hamilton
Paul Buchheit
Product Engineering: A hallmark of history's greatest Software Engineers
Margaret Hamilton
Paul Buchheit
Kevin Systrom
Product Engineering: A hallmark of history's greatest Software Engineers
Margaret Hamilton
Paul Buchheit
Kevin Systrom
Jan Koum
Product Engineering: A hallmark of history's greatest Software Engineers
Margaret Hamilton
Paul Buchheit
Kevin Systrom
Jan Koum
Product Engineering: A hallmark of history's greatest Software Engineers
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Margaret Hamilton
Paul Buchheit
Kevin Systrom
Jan Koum
Product Engineering: A hallmark of history's greatest Software Engineers
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
You
Margaret Hamilton
capturing got easy
taste didn’t
math got cheap
interpretation didn’t
autopilot flew more
accountability still matters
transactions got automated
advice and trust didn’t
You got this
We got this
Thank you!
đť•Ź @kentcdodds
The Last Software Engineer (short version)
By Kent C. Dodds
The Last Software Engineer (short version)
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.
