We Are The Art - AI & Software Engineering

In the past few months, the release of powerful LLMs such as Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 as well as agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, and more have led to a lot of discussion in the software engineering industry. While some engineers are excited about using artificial intelligence to speed up their workflows, others are scared that we’re done and software engineers will no longer exist in the following months - the social media fearmongers definitely don’t help.

I was recently watching Brandon Sanderson’s keynote speech and it made me draw some parallels with the current state of engineering, which led me to write this piece. This opinion will probably be outdated in the next couple of years or maybe even months, but that’s okay. That’s part of trying to imagine what the future is going to be like.

In his speech, he says “Where will we go when there is no room for humans in art? You might say, ‘Well, if AI gets good enough and the product is the same, what’s the difference?’ The difference is that the books aren’t the product. They aren’t the art - not completely. And this is the point. The most important thing to understand is that the process of creating art makes art of you.” He also goes on to say “My friends, let me repeat that. The book, the painting, the film script is not the only art. It’s important, but in a way it’s a receipt. It’s a diploma. The book you write, the painting you create, the music you compose is important and artistic, but it’s also a mark of proof that you have done the work to learn. Because in the end of it all, you are the art.”

This resonates with the way I think engineers (software, security, QA, etc.) should navigate this AI revolution we’re going through. The process of engineering makes the engineer, as much as the process of creating art makes the artist. Engineering isn’t just writing code. That’s part of it, but it’s not what makes you or me a good engineer. Engineering is a process that requires making informed decisions, thinking, planning, and executing complex solutions, changing those plans, testing hypotheses and failing, and then coming back with an alternative.

So when someone asks me: is it still worth learning to code? My opinion is: yes, absolutely! Coding is just part of what you’ll need to learn for the journey. The field will change, sure, but engineers will not be replaced tomorrow. The same way the cloud made system administrators become devops engineers and then site reliability engineers. The same way cybersecurity has significantly changed from on-premises security and the network perimeter to zero trust and considering a larger attack surface.

LLMs and agents are tools - powerful ones, but tools. You shouldn’t be delegating everything to them. You should be driving them, using them to learn, to help you speed up your workflows, and to deliver better results. You should be leveraging them to become a more complete engineer by being able to work on areas that were not your expertise before nor were you willing to tackle from scratch.

I, myself, am using AI right now to write this piece. This is not AI written, but I’ve fed it with Sanderson’s speech and am using Claude Code as a rubber duck. I’m talking to it, reasoning with it, exploring ideas, understanding my own thought process, and then typing my own words, using my own voice. And, once everything is typed out, I’ll ask the AI to review it for typos. I’m not making it write the piece for me, I’m using it as a copilot - no pun intended.

The question we should all be asking is: what does it look like to be the art as an engineer in an AI world? I’d say being the one who understands why the code does what it does, not just that it works. When something breaks at 2 am, you can reason through it, you’re able to understand it, because you actually built it and didn’t accept AI output at face value.

It is being the one in the room who can take a vague business problem and translate it into a technical approach, challenge your own assumptions with AI as a thinking partner, use AI to stress-test your approach, and then make an informed decision. It’s being the problem solver. In the end, we are still the experts. We are the engineers. We are the art.