I don't think engineers will exist in a few years

Bryce Villanueva — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 15:30:34 +0000

I know how that sounds. I'm an engineer. I've built hardware and software at Tesla, shipped software at J.P. Morgan, and now I execute forward deployed engineering at Blueflame AI. I'm not trying to advocate against myself... 😅

Hear me out.

Bart Butler, Proton's CTO, just published a manifesto that put it bluntly: "Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code." His line "programming is dead, engineering is not" lit up engineering Twitter. DHH defended it. Hacker News pushed back hard.

I agree with him, and I'd go much further. Not only is programming dying, it's the whole idea of "engineer" as a separate job.

My friend and colleague Sung Choi, CTO of Grata Intelligence at Datasite, sat down with me one-on-one, and he explained it better than anyone in that thread:

"At the end of the day, what matters is that we want our engineers to be delivering value and delivering the outcomes our customers need, and whether you do it as a front-end engineer or a back-end engineer, it's not as important as you applying your particular sensibilities, your judgment, and your taste into producing the right outcome."

Read that thoroughly. Not your title, not your stack: it's your judgment and your taste.

This is the focus we're attacking at Blueflame too (yes we're all one Datasite family but alignment is everything).

If what matters is the outcome, then front-end, back-end, product, even "engineer" stops being the point. The people who win are the ones who know what's worth building and can tell when it's actually good.

Next: what really matters when arbitrary titles don't.

Credit where credit is due (sources):

[1] Proton's AI manifesto: https://proton.me/blog/ai-manifesto

Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/protons-cto-ai-manifesto-software-engineers-coding-2026-10

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/protons-cto-ai-manifesto-software-engineers-coding-2026-10

DEV Community: Bryce Villanueva

I don't think engineers will exist in a few years