Software Engineering is back
March 4, 2026
Labour cost. This is the quiet one. The one nobody puts on the conference slide. For companies, it is much better having Google, Meta, Vercel deciding for you how you build product and ship code. Adopt their framework. Pay the cost of lock in. Be enchanted by their cloud managed solution to host, deploy, store your stuff. And you unlock a feature that has nothing to do with engineering: you no longer need to hire a software engineer. You hire a React Developer. No need to train. Plug and play. Easy to replace. A cog in a machine designed by someone else, maintaining a system architected by someone else, solving problems defined by someone else. This is not engineering. This is operating.
In my opinion Software engineering, the true one, is back again.
Alain di Chiappari argues that for years or longer we have abdicated our responsibility as software engineers handing that responsibility over to companies like Google and Meta who develop tools and frameworks that we then sit on top of.
But with AI based software development tools, he argues software engineering as a practice is back.
