State of Software Engineering in 2026: A Reality Check Beyond the AI Hype Three and a half years ago, Matt Welsh, PhD and former Google engineer, published "The End of Programming" in Communications of the ACM and declared that classical computer science was over. The meteor had hit. Engineers were the dinosaurs. The state of software engineering in 2026, he implied, would look nothing like what
At 3:17 AM on a Tuesday in Q3 2024, our production Kotlin 2.0 microservice fleet hit a 92% memory utilization threshold across 140 nodes, traced to a silent coroutine leak in Ktor 2.2’s request pipeline that had been bleeding 12MB of heap per second for 72 hours. We lost $14k in SLO credits before we found the root cause. A Couple Million Lines of Haskell: Production Engineering at Mercury (78 p