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
My Hugo blog was downloading 3.6 MB of JavaScript and 40 KB of external CSS on every page load. For a static blog with mostly text and a few diagrams, that was absurd. Here is how I fixed it. HTML: 86 KB JavaScript: 3.6 MB (Mermaid + KaTeX) CSS: 40 KB (KaTeX stylesheets) Problem: render-blocking scripts loaded on every page for math and diagrams Adding minifyOutput = true to hugo.toml shrunk HTML