It’s mind-boggling that anyone could deny this in mid-2026. Virtually every software engineer I know is no longer writing the majority of their code. Many are not writing any code, myself included. And I’m a staff engineer with 20 yoe, formerly at big tech, and now building a (profitable) SaaS of my own. The way I work is wildly different from a year ago.
And no one is going back.
The most prevalent trend I see around me today is that people are going back to using the LLMs as research, review, and sketching tools, but writing most actual code themselves again. And it's not just AI skeptics doing that, it's those who went all-in and are finally seeing the downsides and limitations of this technology, now that the hype is waning.
Before GPT what would have been your choise of architecture, setup, alogorithm if someone comes to you and says "write a tool/system which can generate code" "what do you mean generate code? How do i control it?" "by writing what you want in natural language" "puh 50 years of development, 100 billion, top tier team of linguists and software engineers perhaps?"
Ask StackOverflow if they think it didn't change anything for them.
If you do this with COBOL or Python, at least you get consistent operation and errors when you're wrong. If you do this with any LLM, consistency is dropped in favor of obsequiousness.
The base problem is that people aren't equipped naturally to think about all the details of their problems.
I assure, it doesn't.