Resending: The changing identity of software engineers

Tuesday, September 8, 2026

My first few months as a tech lead were challenging. I frequently left work in a daze, not really sure what I had accomplished. Like many software engineers, my journey began by writing side projects on my own and discovering a love of the creative problem solving process. With my promotion to tech lead, however, my days were no longer six hours of coding. Instead, I spent my time answering questions for teammates, attending meetings, and triaging incoming requests. It was a luxury to get an hour of coding. I felt like a fraud, someone who wasn’t accomplishing anything and getting paid for it.

I confided my feelings to a mentor and they reassured me that I was doing a good job…but that tech lead is a different job from what I had been doing to that point. The demands and responsibilities are different, and the way I impact the team is different. I was used to impacting the team by writing code and I could no longer do that as a tech lead. My job was to impact the team by helping others be more productive.

While this made sense, I still couldn’t shake the sense that I had lost something. A piece of me felt like it was missing. This was my first experience with an identity crisis, where a change in my job left me feeling uneasy about who I was and what I was doing. This is a common occurrence with significant life changes such as job loss. While I still had a job, it wasn’t the same job I was used to, and that was difficult.

I see the same thing happening to software engineers as AI takes over more of their jobs. There’s an uneasiness as their identity, the person who writes code, is replaced by a manager-like role overseeing one or more AI agents. Supervising other people or agents wasn’t why they became software engineers. They became software engineers because they enjoyed writing code and solving problems. When AI can do both of those things and your only job is to watch over them, what is your identity? It’s normal to feel a sense of loss as you’re told it’s no longer cost-effective for you to be writing code.

I eventually settled into my role as a tech lead and began to enjoy it. Once I better understood that I could contribute in ways that didn’t involve writing code, I was able to relax into the position and thrive. The AI transition is more challenging because we are forcing people to change their roles much earlier in their careers. My last two full time jobs were as a principal engineer where I didn’t write much code and instead oversaw the work of other people, so working with AI was a horizontal transition to overseeing agents instead of humans. For people who never had to do that, it’s a vertical transition, and that’s a lot more challenging.

The role of software engineer has changed, probably forever, in the face of AI. There’s a collective feeling of grief as our jobs transition away from what we have been doing. This change will fundamentally alter who fills these roles going forward. It’s going to be the people who enjoy structuring work for others to do rather than people who want to write code all day. For those of us in the middle of this transition, the identity crisis will either lead us to come to peace with this new way of working or ultimately seek a different profession.

Key Takeaways

AI is pushing software engineers through the same identity crisis I experienced as a new tech lead, forcing us to redefine our value beyond writing code.
The transition is especially difficult for engineers who are being asked to oversee AI agents before they have ever learned to structure and supervise the work of other people.
The software engineering role is changing permanently, and the people who thrive in it will increasingly be those who enjoy directing work rather than doing all of the coding themselves.

A gentle introduction to Git worktrees

Git worktrees let you check out multiple branches into separate directories simultaneously, making parallel local development straightforward whether you're working solo or alongside AI coding agents.

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Stuff I've Enjoyed this Month

📝 How we built a software factory to drive Astro’s GitHub issue count to zero by Cloudflare
Cloudflare built an automated pipeline of AI agents to reproduce, diagnose, and fix incoming issues in the Astro repository. The system has reduced the project’s open issues substantially while giving maintainers more time to focus on the project itself.

🎬 OmniRoute + OpenCode is INSANE (Why I Dropped Claude Code) by AI Jason
This video explores using the open-source OpenCode coding agent with OmniRoute instead of relying solely on Claude Code. The combination provides access to different models and providers, along with fallback routing and more control over usage costs.

📖 The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby
This book tells the story of Demis Hassabis, from childhood chess prodigy to co-founder and CEO of DeepMind. The book also chronicles DeepMind’s breakthroughs, its relationship with Google, and Hassabis’s pursuit of artificial general intelligence.

🎬 The safest way to store Bitcoin was just hacked… by Fireship
Fireship breaks down a security flaw that undermined the randomness used to generate keys for Coldcard Bitcoin hardware wallets. The episode is a striking example of how a seemingly small programming mistake can have enormous security consequences.

📝 How Claude’s text watermark works by Anthropic
Anthropic explains the invisible watermark it is adding to Claude-generated text to comply with the EU AI Act. The technique subtly influences token selection without adding hidden characters, changing the meaning of responses, or identifying individual users.

📝 Moving to issues as the new PRs by Goose
The Goose team argues that coding agents have made generating pull requests so cheap that the traditional open-source contribution model no longer scales. Their proposed alternative moves design and discussion into GitHub issues first, then lets agents turn approved issues into code.

🎬 Why Tech Companies Are Quietly Cancelling AI Data Centers by Economy Media
This video looks at reports that a significant number of planned AI data center projects are being delayed or canceled. It examines whether infrastructure spending has gotten ahead of actual AI demand and what a slowdown could mean for the broader AI investment boom.

What I'm Working On

🏠 Real Estate: Finally a quiet month with all tenants paying their rent and no major repairs necessary. I do have to refinance one property, which is lousy because my interest rate will go up by two percent points, but it can't be avoided. These commercial mortgages have five-year terms that basically force you to refinance until paid off. Follow my Instagram for real estate photos.

🍞 Bredbox: Bredbox, my "read later" app, is now in open beta!

The new blog shares details about how you can use the app most effectively as well as insights into why I built it.
The mobile apps are getting ready for app store submission.
The app now tracks what you started reading so it's easy to pick up where you left off.
The full content of your library can now be exported so you can take everything with you, including full copies of articles.
There's a cardless 30-day free trial to see if you like it.

💻 Open Source: Thanks to a free six-month Claude Max 20x account for open source work, I've been able to put together some projects I've had on the backburner:

Social Logos is an npm package containing SVGs and React components to render logos for social media.
Paged Media polyfill is a JavaScript library that polyfills the missing support for CSS Paged Media in Chrome.
SCSSTree is an npm package that allows CSSTree-based utilities (like the ESLint CSS plugin) to lint SCSS files.

💻 ESLint: My free Claude Max 20x account let's me finally tackle some of the biggest ESLint challenges. We've made some great progress on improving performance (the CLI is 20% faster in our benchmarks with more to come). I've also been working with Claude to write a completely new JavaScript/TypeScript parser that is optimized for the way ESLint works. It has both JavaScript and Rust versions, and the Rust versions are more than three times faster than Espree, the current built-in JavaScript parser.

Coaching for Tech Leads and Staff+ Engineers

If you're a tech lead or staff+ engineer, chances are your manager has no experience in your role. While they may be well-intentioned, they may not know how to help you grow in such a challenging position.

That's where working with me can help. As a former tech lead and principal engineer at multiple companies, I learned firsthand the ins and outs of these roles. I work with my clients one-on-one to develop their leadership, communication, organization, and problem-solving skills to succeed in the upper ranks of the individual contributor track.

Learn more

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