This week I came across two posts with more moderate takes on how AI will influence our work.

Alberto de Prezzo argues   that while AIs generate the solutions, engineers are still needed to make the right trade-offs and to provide the undocumented context of the codebase/project/company:

But complexity will remain. It belongs to engineers who can understand the most complexity while introducing the least unnecessary complexity of their own.

AI can help us get there. But it cannot relieve us of our responsibility for what we ship.

Arvind Narayanan gave a talk   “What will be left for us to work on?” at ICML this year. He frames AI as Normal Technology and argues that this is how we should predict the impact it has on our jobs. Arvind believes jobs will be radically different, but AI will amplify humans instead of relacing them. Rather than automation agents we should build collaboration agents that work in tandem with a human. A transcript of the talk is here   .

I think it’s interesting to snapshot these predictions (August 2026) and come back to them in two year’s time.