Tom

[Tom @tom_enden]

1/ I’m a software engineer at Wix. I’ve been writing code for 20+ years.

In 2018, I gave a talk about software engineering as a philosophical activity.

At @WixEng, I presented the sequel:

AI changed the craft.

So what still matters?

Dialogue.
Ownership.
Judgment.

[dax @thdxr]

i am having more fun than ever collaborating with people

get an agent in the mix, we all bounce ideas off each other. prompt it, get more ideas. narrow in on something

stop dooming about ai and your job and start gangprompting

[Tom @tom_enden]

I’m so glad you watched and enjoyed it @unclebobmartin !

Your work has had a big impact on how I think about software engineering throughout my career, and it was a major inspiration for this talk.

This feedback really made my day :)

[Uncle Bob Martin @unclebobmartin]

@WixEng @tom_enden Great talk. Short and sweet. Dead on.

[Tom @tom_enden]

@shadcn That’s an excellent idea, thanks!
Will give it a try

[Wix Engineering @WixEng]

If AI can write the code, where do engineers create ✨ value?

That's the question @tom_enden tackles in this thought-provoking talk.

He explores how the role is evolving, which skills are becoming more important, and what may separate the engineers who thrive in the AI era from those who struggle to adapt.

Along the way, Tom connects ideas from influential voices such as @unclebobmartin, @karpathy, @paulg, @abeanstalker, and others to explore what engineering may look like in a world where AI writes the code.

If you're trying to understand where software engineering is headed - this talk is worth watching:

[Tom @tom_enden]

Honestly thrilled to see my talk cross 1,200 views in less than 4 days!

I cared a lot about making this one — it's about AI, software engineering, philosophy, and what still matters when the craft changes.

If you haven’t watched it yet, I’d love for you to check it out 👇

[Tom @tom_enden]

1/ I’m a software engineer at Wix. I’ve been writing code for 20+ years.

In 2018, I gave a talk about software engineering as a philosophical activity.

At @WixEng, I presented the sequel:

AI changed the craft.

So what still matters?

Dialogue.
Ownership.
Judgment.

[Tom @tom_enden]

@oradotai I just discovered you are doing exactly this, excited to follow along and see what you produce 🤩

[Tom @tom_enden]

1/
The horse carriage wasn't designed for engines. The first cars looked like carriages anyway — because that's what people knew. It took decades to design cars for cars.

We're at that exact moment with the web.

[Tom @tom_enden]

8/
We're at an inflection point. The carriage era is ending.

The question isn't whether the agent-native web is coming. It's who's going to design it — and whether we'll get stuck in the carriage phase for a decade because we're too comfortable with what we know.

[Everlier @Everlier]

If you're building a CLI of any kind, add a section for agents to the help, also add a command for agents to load skill contents related to the usage of the CLI.

agent-browser is a great example and I think more tools should follow the same template.

[Tom @tom_enden]

14/ Full talk:

The End of Determinism — On Dialogue, Authorship & Taste
https://t.co/Nq4Qwi5QwV

For engineers using AI deeply:

Are you more confident owning the code you ship?
Or less?

[Tom @tom_enden]

12/ My thesis:

The code got easier to produce.
The questions got harder.

Authorship is distributed.
Ownership is not.

Taste recognizes.
Judgment commits.

That is the job now.

[Tom @tom_enden]

13/ A genuine thank you to @signulll @badlogicgames and @giansegato.

Your writing and thinking around AI, software, craft, and what changes next helped me see this shift more clearly, and shaped a lot of what I cover in this talk.

[Tom @tom_enden]

11/ @paulg wrote:

“When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.”

Exactly.

When building gets cheaper, taste gets more expensive.
Judgment becomes the bottleneck.

[Tom @tom_enden]

6/ Coding is moving from monologue to dialogue.

Before AI, when you wrote code, you were usually the only thinking participant.

Now programming often happens through dialogue with another intelligent entity.

But not every chat is dialogue.

[Tom @tom_enden]

10/ That’s the real risk.

Not that AI writes code.
That engineers stop owning the outcome.

One mindset says:
“The agent wrote it. Tests passed. Ship it.”

The other says:
“I used the agent. I understand the behavior. I stand behind it.”

[Tom @tom_enden]

9/ @abeanstalker and @vercel set the right bar:

“Would you be comfortable owning a production incident tied to this pull request?”

Not: did AI write it?

Would you own it?

[Tom @tom_enden]

8/ Authorship is getting blurry.

The model suggests.
You reject.
It rewrites.
You steer.
It tests.
You decide.

git blame still points at a human.
But the authorship story is no longer that simple.

[Tom @tom_enden]

7/ A weak AI coding session is:

“Make it work.”
“Make it faster.”
“Ship it.”

A strong one is:

“What are we assuming?”
“What breaks at 10x?”
“Why this approach?”
“What would I regret debugging later?”

[Tom @tom_enden]

5/ @unclebobmartin looks at AI writing syntax and says: "good riddance."
I think he’s right.

Syntax was always scaffolding.
The real craft is reasoning about systems, tradeoffs, behavior, and responsibility.

[Tom @tom_enden]

1/ I’m a software engineer at Wix. I’ve been writing code for 20+ years.

In 2018, I gave a talk about software engineering as a philosophical activity.

At @WixEng, I presented the sequel:

AI changed the craft.

So what still matters?

Dialogue.
Ownership.
Judgment.

[Tom @tom_enden]

4/ @karpathy called English “the hottest new programming language.”

That matters because programming has always had a technical gate.
AI lowers it dramatically.

Now anyone can build.
But building well is still a craft.

[Tom @tom_enden]

3/ For decades, software engineering had a comforting myth:

If you wrote the code, you understood the code.
That was never fully true.

But AI makes the fiction impossible to ignore.

[Tom @tom_enden]

2/ Full talk:
https://t.co/Nq4Qwi5QwV

The core claim:
AI didn’t kill software engineering.
It promoted it.

Less of the job is typing syntax.
More of the job is dialogue, ownership, taste, and judgment.