Deep Blue
February 16, 2026
Becoming a professional software engineer is hard. Getting good enough for people to pay you money to write software takes years of dedicated work. The rewards are significant: this is a well compensated career which opens up a lot of great opportunities.
It’s also a career that’s mostly free from gatekeepers and expensive prerequisites. You don’t need an expensive degree or accreditation. A laptop, an internet connection and a lot of time and curiosity is enough to get you started.
The idea that this could all be stripped away by a chatbot is deeply upsetting.
Annie Vella wrote something that resonated with a lot of people in March 2025 The Software Engineering Identity Crisis .
She spoke about how the identity of many software engineers was rooted in the act of writing code. And it resonated with a lot of people because it saw widespread reposting and appeared on various high-profile software engineering-focused podcasts.
Here, Simon Willison addresses something similar and talks about the concept of “Deep Blue”: The ennui felt by software engineers, as the central part of identity, has rapidly become less relevant.
