Engineers Automate So They Can Do the Hard Part

AI tools now write a large share of everyday code, and software developer job postings are still rising, as CNBC reported this week. If a machine does the typing, why would anyone hire more people to do the job?

The question assumes that the job was the typing. Camille Fournier, who has managed engineers at several companies, describes the opposite instinct in The Manager’s Path. Engineers automate their work on purpose: “We engineers automate so that we can focus on the fun stuff,” and the fun stuff, she says, is the work that uses most of your brain. A tool that removes the routine part of a task has always been the goal, and developers have been building such tools for as long as there have been developers.

Seen that way, a coding assistant is the latest and most capable item on a long list. Compilers, frameworks, and deployment scripts each took a layer of routine work away from the person doing the job. None of them shrank the profession. Each one made software cheaper to build, and cheaper software meant more of it: more products, more integrations, more systems that someone has to keep running.

That is one plausible explanation for the postings, and it asks less of the evidence than either popular story. The first story says the postings are a lag, that employers have not yet noticed that the work is gone. The second says the tools are overhyped and nothing has changed. Neither explains why companies would keep paying for roles they no longer need, or for tools that do nothing.

What the explanation does predict is a change in what the open roles ask for. Fournier’s point about the work that uses most of your brain cuts both ways. If the routine share of a developer’s day falls, the remaining share is the part that machines handle badly: deciding what to build, reading code nobody fully understands, and answering for a system when it fails. Those tasks do not scale with a subscription. They scale with people who can be trusted to do them.

So the useful way to read a rising count of developer postings is as a measure of demand for judgment, not of demand for typists. Whether employers are actually hiring for judgment is something the job descriptions themselves can show, and that is where the claim should be tested.