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
We had ArgoCD running perfectly. Every deployment was reconciled from Git. Drift detection worked. Rollbacks were one-click. Our GitOps setup was clean. Developers still couldn't provision a staging environment without pinging the platform team. That gap — between "GitOps in place" and "developers can actually self-serve" — is where most platform engineering teams get stuck. GitOps solves a real p
Anthropic now ships at least three different memory models inside the Claude product family, and they don't behave the same way. Claude.ai has a chat memory feature for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users that summarizes prior conversations and injects that summary into new chats. Claude Code has CLAUDE.md files plus a separate "auto memory" directory the model writes to itself, both loaded at se
Part 2 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract - what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. Stripe never skipped the boring stuff. They ship 1,300 AI PRs a week. Amazon skipped it. Their storefront went down for six hours. Kent Beck wrote the answer in Extreme Programming Explained in 1999. We read it. Then chose velocity anyway. A friend of mine leads engineering at a funde