Coding is a small part of software engineering. 🤯

With AI Coding Assistants and Autonomous Agents being all the rage lately, I feel like this is something folks—especially those early in their careers—need to hear.

Coding is essential, but only a portion of what is required to build production systems.

Writing software can take a lot of effort, but just as much is spent before anyone starts to code.

Let's think about some of those tasks:

• Defining API contracts
• Designing a database schema
• Choosing the right database
• Configuring build & deployment pipelines
• Selecting a runtime environment
• Packaging software (Dockerfiles?)
• Integrating observability tools
• Writing runbooks and service manuals

And that's all before you even consider architectural trade-offs, system design, or cross-team alignment.

A lot of software engineering involves understanding what needs to be done and why—and then figuring out how to do it well.

Even with how fast AI is evolving, we are still a long way from AI completely taking over software engineering, but it's revolutionizing how we attack the process.

Are you embracing our robot overlords or resisting change? 🤖