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The Software Engineer Job isn't going away, but it is Changing - CEO of Microsoft

Author

John Robert
June 27, 2025

Yesterday(26.06.2025) at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said something that stopped me in my tracks.

All of us are going to be creating software. But there is going to be a job called a software engineer. It's going to be different… You’re now a software architect.

That single line tells a story of where we’ve come from and where we’re headed.

Let me explain.

👩‍💻 Remember the First Time You Broke Production?

If you’ve ever worked on a live codebase, chances are you’ve had the Oh no moment a broken build, a weird bug that only shows up in production, or an invisible merge conflict that swallowed someone else’s work.

It’s stressful, humbling, and a rite of passage.

What Satya reminded me of is that even in a world full of powerful AI tools that write code faster than ever, those moments aren’t going away. They’re just shifting.

In fact, debugging a human’s code might soon feel quaint compared to understanding what five autonomous AI agents did to your repository overnight.

🤖 The Rise of the Invisible Developer

Nadella shared that one of his favorite GitHub features right now is the ability to trace every change made by AI agents in a codebase.

Why? Because even the CEO of Microsoft gets lost when the machine “does stuff that I don't know what the heck happened.”

Sound familiar?

We’re moving into a world where software engineering won’t just be about writing functions it will be about understanding the intentions behind machine-generated ones.

You’re not just building code anymore. You’re managing a team of tireless, code-churning interns who never sleep, never get tired and also never explain themselves.

🏗️ From Engineers to Architects

In this world, the engineer becomes more like an architect. You’ll still need deep technical understanding. You’ll still need logic and intuition. But your main job will be:

  • Designing robust systems that AI tools can build upon

  • Ensuring coherence and quality across AI-generated code

  • Managing context across multiple tools, contributors, and agents

  • And perhaps most importantly understanding why something changed in your repo, not just what changed

That requires what Nadella called metacognition being able to mentally model the state of the codebase and the agents contributing to it.

💡 The New Developer Skillset

As I thought about it, I realized: this is not the death of software engineering. It’s just the end of the “manual labor” version of it.

And in its place? Something arguably more demanding.

We’re entering an age where the best software engineers will:

  • Use AI to prototype faster, but review more critically

  • Shift from task execution to outcome orchestration

  • Think more like systems designers than code typists

  • Read and audit changelogs like detectives following a trail of AI decisions

If that sounds scary, take a breath. Because the core of what makes a great engineer hasn’t changed: clear thinking, good judgment, and a deep respect for users and systems.

🚀 Don’t Fear AI. Lead It.

Here’s the truth: most people won’t want to follow what’s coming. They’ll resist it, fear it, or ignore it.

But those who embrace it who learn to work with AI tools like colleagues, not threats will be the ones designing the future.

So no, the software engineer isn’t going anywhere.