> These VPs are slowly becoming software engineers. It's hilarious to watch, but seems rather inefficient.

Tell me you weren't around for the dot com bubble without telling me.

At that point in time if you told any one you could build on the web they spent an hour pitching you their bad idea and then wanted you to build it for nothing. They thought the value was in the idea, not the implementation.

Now, if you have an idea, then go use AI to prototype, to validate, to iterate.

IF that results in a viable product then you need an engineer to go in and do the needed work to operationalize it. To attach testing, monitoring, deployment and more over cost metrics (something we have not really done in the last 30 years) - because a good idea that costs more to run than it makes is not a good idea.

The nuance is here - the "tweak this and we can save $0.50 a user a month" is how you move the needle at scale.

Programing is dead, Software development has a narrow place - engineering for sustainability, reliability and cost are what the field is going to become. Someone has to be responsible, or be on the hook for the 3am on a holiday weekend phone call.

Yes the job of the software engineering professional is now strictly non-functional requirements.

Cost, latency, security, auditing, monitoring, operating.

LLMs can handle the functional requirements of “give me this output for these inputs” very well.