As AI coding agents take flight, what does this mean for jobs?
January 19, 2026
But if AI is doing more of the software building grunt work, what does that mean for the humans involved? It’s a question that’s front-of-mind for just about everyone in the industry. Anthony Goto, a staff engineer at Netflix, addressed this matter directly on TikTok a few weeks back. The most common question that he hears from new graduates and early-career engineers, he said, is whether they’ve made a mistake entering software development just as AI tools are accelerating. “Are we cooked?” is how he succinctly summed up the concern.
Clearly, this is a question that is front of mind for a lot of folks in Software Engineering right now. In this piece from TESSL, there’s a useful roundup of what some prominent and well-known software engineers have been saying recently about the impact of AI and large-size models on Software Engineering.
