Software Engineering Is Dead. Long Live Product Engineering

The piece argues that writing code is ceasing to be the core of software work because LLMs and agents now handle most implementation, review, and even parts of deployment and scaling. Laurie Voss (npm co‑founder) frames the emerging role as product engineering - a modern revival of the 1960s systems analyst - focused on translating customer needs into the right product, providing context for agents, and designing features that actually fit users (a bakery needs a different order system than a generic app). Examples cited include one‑shot animation by Opus 5.5 and rapid coding via Codex/GPT models, plus mentions of GPT‑6 Astra and DeepSeek‑V4.1‑Flash; the claim is that product sense, context engineering, sales and marketing, and customer discovery will become the real leverage points.

The practical consequences are concrete: senior engineers with product and systems judgment will gain value (forward‑deployed roles already pay around $240k), while junior engineers risk losing traditional apprenticeship opportunities because agents take over the execution and review loop. Orchestrating agent fleets remains messy and customer‑facing work is still hard, so companies must reinvest in apprenticeship, system‑design training, and encourage building in public and open‑source work to bootstrap evidence of skill. The author predicts this shift will accelerate in 2-5 years, warns of a bubble and retraining needs, and urges proactive career and organizational adjustments.