The Last Software Engineer
The most durable skills you can develop
Let's wake up
Your brain needs this đź§
Thank you
🤳
❤️
product
consequences
Product engineering
implementation
decisions
what would be useful given this system, this cost, these risks, and these constraints?
product
decisions
Product management
user/business
needs
what would be useful given these users, this market, this business model, and these priorities?
Your Tools
You
The work
The work
The work
Your Tools
(agents)
You
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
The work
Artificial General Intelligence
The work
(Almost) Artificial General Intelligence
The work
(Almost) Artificial General Intelligence
Y
o
u
What's happening
here?
Judgement
Product Engineering
A recovering software implementation educator
Hi, I'm Kent C. Dodds
Robert C. Martin
Code is the slow part for humans… We had to walk away from the binary. Then we had to walk away from the assembly language… And now we're going to walk away from the code.
Shaundai Person
We have to think about what is this product supposed to be now? What is it supposed to be long term?
Building the thing right is downstream of building the right thing.
[product engineers care about] customer experience and the commercials of the product. Not just tinkering with tech, but getting an outcome.
Wayne Allan
…you're using [AI] to bring things for you to use your judgment on. So … give yourself as much information as you can to make a judgment.
Will King
What to build, how to build it, when to build it — that is still our choice.
Customers don't have to deal with the consequences of being wrong.
Jack Ryan
You might have to go talk to stakeholders and people that before you were just totally shielded from.
Lucas Wargha
Grady Booch
We have judgment that is informed by a particular kind of experience… knowledge of computer science… algorithms and architecture and the human issues.
What if I'm wrong?
You are here
Paul Buchheit
Kevin Systrom
Jan Koum
Product Engineering: A hallmark of history's greatest Software Engineers
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
You
Margaret Hamilton
A couple quick things...
and then I'll wrap up...
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
By Kent C. Dodds
The Last Software Engineer
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.
