This is a submission for the 2026 WeCoded Challenge: Echoes of Experience
The title "software engineer" might disappear in a few years.
And my reaction surprised me: I'm not scared. I'm excited.
Maybe that says something about where I came from.
I wasn't supposed to be here
I didn't start in tech. I did a career switch — coming from a biology background into frontend engineering. And for a long time, that felt like a disadvantage.
I always had a different way of thinking about problems. A different angle. But I was afraid to speak up because I felt I didn't know enough about the technical side to have a valid opinion. I felt less smart than others when it came to tech. Less intelligent. It's something I've been working on through the years — and it still haunts me from time to time.
What I didn't realise back then was that always needing to adapt, always needing to learn more, always looking at things from a different angle — that was quietly becoming my superpower.
Then I watched this video about Claude Code
Boris Cherny — the person who built Claude Code at Anthropic — has not manually written a single line of code since November 2025. He ships 10 to 30 PRs a day, with 5 parallel Claude instances running simultaneously. Every single one, written by Claude Code.
"Coding is largely solved."
— Boris Cherny, Lenny's Podcast
Claude Code's own codebase? No code older than 6 months exists in production. It rewrites itself constantly.
The numbers are kind of wild:
- $1B in run-rate revenue in 6 months after launch (Slack took 5 years)
- 4% of all public GitHub commits are now authored by Claude Code
- Engineering productivity at Anthropic increased 200% per engineer
And on Boris's team — PMs, designers, finance people — everyone codes now. Not because they learned syntax. Because the barrier dropped.
His prediction: "software engineer" gets replaced by "builder".
Here's why my biology brain sees this differently
Evolution doesn't reward the strongest. It rewards the ones who adapt.
I spent years feeling like an outsider in tech. Non-traditional background. Always catching up. Always needing to learn one more thing, one more language, one more framework to feel legitimate.
But that constant adaptation? That's exactly the muscle that matters now.
The skill that's becoming most valuable isn't syntax. It's judgment. Taste. Knowing what to build and why. Seeing problems from angles others miss. Communicating ideas clearly.
Asking the right question > writing the right line.
People who had to constantly adapt to survive in tech — who never had the luxury of staying in one stack — we've been training for this the whole time.
But let me be honest about something
I still feel like a fraud sometimes.
Every time I think I know something, I share it, and I get feedback that it could be done differently, or that there's still so much to learn. That feeling doesn't fully go away.
What changed is that I found something that helps.
With Claude, I feel like I have a buddy I can think out loud with. Someone I can ask questions to, explore ideas with, check if my thoughts are worth sharing or if I misunderstood something — without the fear of being judged.
Do I have all the answers? No.
Am I braver than I was a year ago? Absolutely.
If you're holding back right now
Maybe you have great ideas but you hold back because you're afraid they're not technical enough, not smart enough, not enough.
You are enough.
Having the right tools to help you grow doesn't make you less. It makes you braver.
The industry is shifting. The people who will thrive aren't necessarily the ones who wrote the most code. They're the ones who know how to think, adapt, and build — regardless of where they started.
I didn't come from tech.
And right now, that feels like exactly the right place to have come from. 💛
Top comments (1)
The "asking the right question > writing the right line" point is the one that sticks. Biology trained you to observe systems and find where they break. That's exactly what good engineering requires.