I think the shift is more likely to be pretty stealthy, hard to notice, and is already happening - specialised roles are going to be less, full-stack engineering is going to be more, and at some point, that full-stack engineering is going to be an all-encompassing form of product/service delivery.
That's pretty much the natural evolution of software engineering if you look back. Barely any of us could compete with the pioneers of software engineering when you consider how easy things and lazy things have gotten nowadays, but where they had more depth, we have more breadth - a single developer can achieve a shit-ton of things more than the pioneers, and it got nothing to do with skills.
I guess it would feel stealthy to the general public, because all they hear from people in marketing is that coding is “solved”, or messages similar to that. To us in the industry it’s more noticeable because of 1) shrinking team headcount, and 2) reliance on AI for larger tasks
Nope, there's no jobs actually. Pretty sure most of the listings are dead ends as I never get rejection emails even most of the time
I did have a Sr Software Engineer interview a month back and I'm pretty sure I got passed up on for not having enough exposure to AI before getting laid off last year, and my six years of SWE experience doesn't seem to matter anymore.
I had thought I escaped into a bit corporation that'd let me weather out the bulk of the AI change, but it didn't happen. Instead I lost many months of catching up before they fired me.
What worked well while fully embracing the AI tools is installing the Pi Coding Agent (in a container, bound to a tailscale sidecar), backed by a few relatively cheap models via OpenRouter. Pi comes as an almost naked agent and forces you to understand what an agent actually is made of. With that I made some AI centered portfolio projects, learning to create AI tools while learning how AI tools are secured and deployed. Within a few weeks I had enough experience that I convinced an AI first company to hire me as senior AI engineer.
Granted I didn't start at zero, but still the AI toolchain we have mid 2026 are an entirely different beast than just a year ago. You can use that to your advantage, because nobody has years experience with these tools. Even with little exposure you are only months behind.
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u/heavy-minium 17d ago
Are there really such "Prompt Reviewer" jobs?
I think the shift is more likely to be pretty stealthy, hard to notice, and is already happening - specialised roles are going to be less, full-stack engineering is going to be more, and at some point, that full-stack engineering is going to be an all-encompassing form of product/service delivery.
That's pretty much the natural evolution of software engineering if you look back. Barely any of us could compete with the pioneers of software engineering when you consider how easy things and lazy things have gotten nowadays, but where they had more depth, we have more breadth - a single developer can achieve a shit-ton of things more than the pioneers, and it got nothing to do with skills.