When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service.
You may be wondering: With all the hype about agentic coding, will we even need software engineers anymore? Yes! We'll need more.
SRE about to become the most hired job in engineering
Everybody wants to write a greenfield demo.
Nobody wants to run a service. https://t.co/THl9rBJ9rk — Swizec Teller (@Swizec) January 13, 2026
Writing code was always the easy part of this job. The hard part was keeping your code running for the long time. Software engineering is programming over time. It's about how systems change.
Let's take no-code and spreadsheets as an example of the kind of software people say is the future – custom-built, throwaway, built by non-experts to solve specific problems.
Joe Schmoe from accounting takes 10 hours to do a thing. He's does this every week and it feels repetitive, mechanical, and boring. Joe could do the work in his sleep.
But he can't get engineering resources to build a tool. The engineers are busy building the product. No worries, Joe is a smart dude. With a little Googling, a few no-code tools, and good old spreadsheet macros he builds a tool.
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