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
GitHub Copilot just got a lot more complicated — and not in a good way. If you tried to sign up for Copilot Pro recently and hit a wall, that's not a bug. GitHub quietly paused new sign-ups for Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student plans starting in late April 2026. No end date announced. No workaround offered. Just a message and a door that won't open. That alone would be worth covering. But they made t
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
Part 1 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract — what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. SWE-CI tested 18 AI models across 71 consecutive commits. Most broke something on commit 47 they'd already broken on commit 1. That's not an intelligence problem. That's a learning system that isn't learning. A paper made me uncomfortable this month. Not because of what it found about