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
AI coding tools are starting to look similar on the surface: they all offer chat, agents, code edits, terminal awareness, and some form of autocomplete. But the real differences are in the workflow. The question is less “which one has AI?” and more “where does the AI live in your development process?” For me, VS Code is still the baseline. It is flexible, extensible, familiar, and easy to compose