A solo developer in Portugal ships a feature to millions of users in four hours. A founder builds a profitable AI product in two weeks—by himself. More than half of all code at major companies is now AI-generated and human-reviewed. What happens when implementation stops being the bottleneck?
In this episode, Ben and Alexa explore the transformation of software engineering from a craft of typing code to an art of directing AI. They examine how tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Replit are already changing the daily reality of developers—and why engineers report being happier, not more anxious, about the shift.
Topics covered:
• The rise of the "Product Engineer" who talks to customers at 10am and ships their feature by 3pm
• Why LeetCode interviews are dying and what replaces them
• How a kid in Jordan with slow internet can now build what took VC-funded teams
• The emergence of "Legacy Translators" who awaken trillion-dollar systems written in the 1970s
• Why taste and vision become the primary differentiators when building is cheap
• The projection that by 2032, solo developers in Lisbon will outcompete 50-person San Francisco teams
• What happens when domain experts—nurses, teachers, scientists—can build their own software
• Children building real apps before they can drive
This is not a story about engineers being replaced. This is about engineers finally getting to do the work that made them want to be engineers in the first place.