AI Makes Software Engineering Harder

The essay gets the economics right: AI is deleting keystrokes, not complexity. Its real value comes from amplifying engineering judgment, not replacing it.

• –AI-generated code still expands a system’s cognitive surface area, even when tests pass
• –Architecture must reflect team skills, scale, budget, risk, and expected product lifetime
• –Every optimization relocates complexity: caching creates invalidation, queues create failure modes, microservices create distributed-systems overhead
• –Smaller, controlled human-AI iterations are safer than merging large opaque code dumps
• –Productivity should measure durable problem-solving and maintainability, not lines of generated code