Software Engineering in the Age of LLMs
With the ever-growing presence of AI and large language models, traditional software engineering is changing rapidly. I envision the software engineer role evolving into a hybrid of product manager, QA engineer, technical architect, and traditional developer.
New Essential Skills for a Developer#
Learn how to interact effectively with LLMs. This means mastering effective prompting techniques and context management—skills that are essentially advanced forms of technical communication. The ability to clearly articulate requirements and constraints to an AI system will become as important as writing clean code.
Get proficient at system design. As LLMs handle more of the implementation details, your value will increasingly come from understanding how systems fit together, anticipating scaling challenges, and making architectural decisions that an AI might miss.
Develop strong product management instincts. You’ll need to think beyond just building features to understanding user needs, prioritizing work, and making strategic technical decisions that align with business goals.
Become a meticulous tester. You’ll need to be able to find critical bugs that AI has slipped in. When working on authentication related features, you will also need to master penetration testing. Learn how to use tools like Burp Suite and run nmap queries on your servers. Cyber security will become more and more important in the age of AI.
The Human-in-the-Loop Reality#
LLMs, in my opinion, won’t become fully self-driving anytime soon. They will continue to require human oversight and guidance. Throughout computing history, we’ve built layers of abstraction—starting from binary code, progressing through assembly language, high-level programming languages, and modern frameworks. LLMs represent simply the next abstraction in this natural progression.
The developers who thrive will be those who learn to work with these tools rather than against them, understanding both their capabilities and limitations while maintaining the critical thinking and system-level perspective that only humans can provide.