“You have to tell your team to stop writing code.”

I said that to one of my managers today.
We both paused… then laughed… then we realized, I wasn’t joking.

Because if your engineers are still sitting at their desks, opening an IDE, and manually tapping away like it’s 2022… we’re doing software engineering wrong.

AI should be writing the code.

Not because engineers are obsolete, but because our value has shifted to the work only humans can do. The real job now is designing architecture, translating business needs into patterns and practices, shaping systems that make sense long before a single line of code exists. AI is the power tool; we’re the ones deciding what to build and how the pieces fit together.

And that shift is liberating. Instead of spending hours buried in boilerplate, we finally get to operate at the level engineering was always meant for—systems thinking, domain modeling, and decision-making that actually changes the trajectory of a project. We become translators of intent, curators of best practices, and guardians of long-term maintainability. AI may type the lines, but we’re the ones defining the boundaries, the architecture, the rules of engagement, and the vision for what the system should become.

The shift also changes how we think about the old coding-bootcamp model. For years, those programs filled a real gap by teaching people how to produce the kind of output teams urgently needed—clean, consistent code written quickly and predictably. But AI now generates that same output at a level and speed no bootcamp could match. That doesn’t mean those developers weren’t valuable; it means the market has evolved. What we need going forward isn’t more people who know what to type, but people who can understand the business domain, frame problems, design systems, and guide AI toward solutions that actually make sense. The opportunity isn’t gone—it’s just moving up the stack, toward the kind of thinking and creativity that no model can replace.

When I say “stop writing code,” I mean this: if you’re hand-coding everything, you’re spending your time on the least valuable part of the craft. Actual keyboard time should be saved for the rare, thorny edge cases—the strange corners of a system where AI still hesitates.

The future of software engineering isn’t about how fast we type.
It’s about how well we think.

So yes: tell your engineers to stop writing code.
It’s funny… but also, it isn’t.