I'm not here to tell you software engineering is ending soon. Nobody can put a reliable date on that, and pretending otherwise is a distraction. But we also have to admit something humbling: a year ago, most of us would not have predicted coding agents would be this good. That should make us less confident about predicting what they'll be able to do one year, or five years, from now.

So let's use "The Last Software Engineer" as a thought exercise. If AI keeps taking over more of the implementation work, what remains most human and valuable for us to do? In this talk, we'll take one step back from the hypothetical end and focus on the durable skill that has always separated great engineers from merely productive ones: judgment.

The future belongs not to people who only know how to build, but to people who know what should be built. We'll talk about product engineering, accountability, trade-offs, constraints, evaluation, and how to keep making software worth having in an AI era.
Sobre Kent C. Dodds: Kent C. Dodds is a world renowned web development educator and engineer. He's actively involved in the open source community. He is the creator of EpicWeb.dev, EpicAI.pro, the Epic Stack, EpicReact.dev, and TestingJavaScript.com. He's a Microsoft MVP, GitHub Star, instructor on egghead.io and Frontend Masters, live streamer, and podcaster. Kent is married and the father of six kids and he lives in Utah. Show less