Symfony reposted this
Every developer is an engineer now People keep saying AI turns every developer into an architect. I've been hearing it for a year, and I don't really feel it as a change. I've been the project lead of Symfony for over twenty years now. Every line in the project might land on my plate to maintain someday. Contributors come and go; I stay. So my job has always been about managing technical debt: sound architecture, up-to-date docs, real test coverage. Do that badly and the project collapses under its own weight. That's not a skill I picked up for the AI era. It's the whole game, and it has been for two decades. What changed is that everyone is now in that position. You didn't type the code, an agent did, but you own it the moment you ship it. And to own it, you have to understand it. I still read every line an agent writes for me, not out of ceremony, but because I might be the one evolving that code next year. You can't evolve what you don't understand. The agent, meanwhile, will happily keep piling on, without caring about quality the way you have to. Look away for a while and the code degrades faster than it ever did when humans wrote it, simply because the pace is so much higher. So deep, careful reviews matter more than ever. That's where the real work happens now: asking the questions, challenging the decisions. That part never changed, whether it's a contributor's pull request or an agent's code. This is the difference between a developer and an engineer. Typing code fast made you a productive developer, and the machine does that part now. What's left is the engineering: understanding the system well enough to own it and keep it alive over years. The machine closed the gap overnight. Some of us just had a head start.