Automating My Favorite Part of Software Engineering

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/automating-my-favorite-part-of-software-engineering.
A software engineer reflects on how AI agents took over coding, debugging, and code reviews, raising questions about the future of engineering.
Check more stories related to programming at: https://hackernoon.com/c/programming. You can also check exclusive content about #software-engineering, #ai, #software-engineer, #ai-coding-agents, #agentic-software-development, #ai-assisted-development, #ai-code-generation, #engineering-with-ai, and more.

This story was written by: @abhicha. Learn more about this writer by checking @abhicha's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com.

I don’t really write code anymore. That feels strange to admit after nearly 20 years of building software at Microsoft and Docusign. But it's the truth. These days, I plan things out with AI, and it handles the implementation. We even have agents reviewing other agents' code and fixing bugs while I sleep. It’s incredible to watch, but it also means I've automated away the parts of the job I used to love the most - like falling down a rabbit hole to debug a tricky issue. It got me thinking: if agents are doing the heavy lifting, do we still need to understand every single line of code? Or is the job of a software engineer just moving up a level? I wrote down some thoughts on this shift, what we're gaining, and what we might be letting go of.