Coding is dead; Engineering is not.

Tech industries have been marking something as dead, since the internet came. They marked PHP dead, they marked the desktop apps dead, now they're saying coding is dead. So, let's disscuss, is coding really dead?

With vibe coding platforms, the startups are bragging about, shipping without developers. Some even say;

If AI can write code, what's left for developers?

Answer to the question.

To answer that bitter question, I would love to share my personal experiences.

First experience is very recent, I guess it was in December. A client approached me on Linkedin, and said this exactly;

"I have created a website with loveable, everything is fine but there's an issue. On google page insights the performance score is only 28%. Can you fix this and bring the score to 90+?"

So, AI generated the website for him, but he still needed my services. And when I looked his code, there were 2000+ lines of code in various single files, images loading on the homepage were above 5 mb, most of'em.

And I did my "engineering" and the performance boosted to 98.

The second experience is that client approached me with a very similar situation, I'll edit his message a bit to avoid confidential information leaks, he said;

"I have a THAT specific issue, I'm trying to resolve it with AI from weeks, but nothing worked out, can you help me in this please? Give me a quotation and a timeline"

So, AI failed at that certain problem, which was basically "Engineering" related; not about "Coding"

To cut the story short, the coding is really dead, but engineering didn't and it'll never.

The death of Coding

Let's be honest; Writing the boilerplate code was never the highest form of intelligence. We even found free templates which really helped a lot several times.

CRUD oprations, API endpoints, forms validations, UI design, these tasks are increasingly automated, and don't be sad, it's not a tragedy, it's progress. Just like calculators didn't kill Mathematics, AI wouldn't kill Engineering. After AI, just an idea died;

A developer is someone who writes the code line by line

What coding was? And why it wasn't enough?

In very descriptive way, "Coding was just syntax execution". And on the other hand, "Engineering is problem solving".

An engineer understands ambiguous requirements, designs scalable systems, anticipates failure modes, balances performance, security, costs and UX, makes trade-off under real world pressure. So, coding is a language, engineering is the mindset.

Why Engineering will always survive?

Real world problems are very messy, they aren't like simple vanila problems. Client contradicts themselves, requirements change in the mid-build, business goals conflicts with technical realities.

Engineering is the ability to shape chaos into meaningful systems. AI can generate functionality, it cannot take responsibility.

AI works always with context and patterns. Now, from the experiences I shared, many files had 2000+ lines of code, not a single AI can make edits in that single file, and reality we have tens and thousands of files, what will AI do there? It'll crash. On the other hand, Engineers write systems based on domain knowledge, business context, user behavior and organized constraints. Context is not a prompt, context is experience.