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
Every AI app I've shipped recently rewrote the same plumbing. The OAuth dance for Slack. Encrypted storage for an API key. Refresh-token logic that finally fails on the 3rd call after an hour. Wiring up an MCP client to a server behind a bearer token someone pasted into a Notion page.