AI may be changing software engineering, but former Google distinguished engineer Kelsey Hightower says developers who bring more than coding skills to the table have little reason to panic.
Speaking on Wednesday’s episode of “The Pragmatic Engineer,” Hightower told show host Gergely Orosz that AI is exposing a long-standing divide between developers who only write code and those who contribute across product, design, architecture, and business decisions.
“You as a software developer, you may have thought your job was to be the only person in organization that can write code. And since no one else could do it, you were safe, right?” he said. “And you probably made more money than everybody, and you were fine with that.”
“And so you didn’t learn any other skills — networking, product management, design, talking to customers,” Hightower added. “Now you got caught. The only thing you were good at is now been commoditized.”
His comments echo a growing sentiment across Silicon Valley that judgment — sometimes described as “taste” — is becoming a key differentiator as AI becomes more proficient at executing tasks. Recent discussions among tech leaders, including Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, have centered on the idea that choosing what to build may matter more than the mechanics of building it.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn also recently said that AI couldn’t replace certain jobs at their companies, because it is hard to automate skills in communication and relationship-building.
Hightower told Orosz later in the interview that software engineering is increasingly evolving into a discipline of making decisions, where “writing is thinking.”
“If you’re a full-stack engineer, you’re probably like, man, there’s so much more than just writing code,” he said, adding that he loves “Claude because now I can focus on those things, and I can use these tools instead.”
