From scribe to architect: what happens after coding is solved?

In the last post, I made the hot take that coding – the syntax, the skill of learning a programming language – is quickly becoming a commodity. The question is not which language to learn, but whether you can be precise enough to tell your machine what you want. That was act one: the arrival of the agents. Onwards to act two: what remains.

In a recent podcast appearance, Boris Cherny compared the craft of software engineering to that of the “medieval scribes.” That tiny, hyper-literate elite. Scribes were often more educated than the kings and lords they served, not just copying books in a painstakingly slow process, but being quite literally the interface to written knowledge for masters who weren’t literate themselves.

Then came the printing press

The printing press didn’t destroy scribes overnight. It just made their core skill – slow, perfected, manual reproduction of text – irrelevant. To go back to Boris’s podcast appearance: the notion that scribes became the first authors is not historically provable, and is probably more of a romantic thought than a documented fact. The truth is that literacy skills survived, expanded rapidly, and found new vessels – early printers, editors, translators, scholars. The craft of producing written text and knowledge did not disappear, but the bottleneck for its proliferation disappeared.

The parallels to software engineering today

It is the running in-joke at many a tech company that the nerds writing software are a small priesthood, gatekeeping access to the mystical ways of the machine. If you don’t speak it – or aren’t code-literate – you can’t join the club. I have lively memories of my first encounter, as a very green PM way too many years ago, with an extremely seasoned architect, who folded me like a camping chair for suggesting a technical solution in a sprint planning. Good times.

AI advancements and the current wave of agents are comparable to the printing press. The “tech-illiterates” – CEOs, some PMs, designers – the kings who could not read – are now starting to build things themselves, using code syntax they don’t even understand.

And it’s not just non-techies shipping entire features without touching code. Even seasoned developers with a deep portfolio of programming languages under their belt are, by adopting AI into their workflow, writing less and less code themselves. Boris notes in the podcast that 100% of his code has been written by AI since November 2025. Andrej Karpathy stated in a recent podcast that by December he had already flipped to writing just 20% of his own code – and hasn’t typed a line since.

Now, those two are extreme examples – and Boris, for one, presumably has unlimited access to tokens.

There is a version of this essay where I spend three paragraphs on token economics, the true cost of compute, and whether we are all just characters in a fever dream fuelled by absurd amounts of investment capital. That essay exists. You are not reading it.

What remains

The engineering part is not going away – and it was never the same thing as coding anyway. The job being replaced is “human-as-syntax-translator.” The job that remains – and was always the aspirational one, by the way – is “human-as-system-thinker.”

This is an important distinction for juniors hitting the job market right now. I recently had a conversation about this with a CTO and founder in the European fintech space, and his framing nailed it: the entry-level job of the future will essentially be something like a “junior architect” or “systems orchestrator.”

All the underlying engineering muscles become more valuable, not less. System design, trade-off analysis, understanding failure modes, knowing why something should be built a certain way. Especially when you are orchestrating five agents simultaneously to go and build separate but ultimately interconnected things.

Ironically, this is what senior engineers were always best at. AI has just removed the prerequisite of absolute syntax fluency – and the scribe bottleneck along with it.

An uncomfortable way forward

I am really not trying to play the prophet here. This is just an attempt at a zoomed-out observation at a very specific point in time, which happens to be early 2026.

But as of right now, it’s clear that the transition – for new engineers and experienced ones alike – won’t be clean or comfortable. If your entire professional identity was built on coding at some insane craft level, that identity is under pressure. Speed was always everything, and the scribing bottleneck is gone.

And with the flood – where everyone, including those with little to no systems thinking, can spin up anything – judgement of quality becomes the scarcest resource. Just like an editor is the last line of defence against a bad author’s output. The difference is that this author (agent) never sleeps, never gets offended by your (the editor’s) feedback, and will cheerfully rewrite the entire chapter in thirty seconds.

Boris mentions in the podcast a 15th-century scribe who was asked how he felt about the printing press. The surprising answer was that he wasn’t lamenting the printing press, he was excited. He had never enjoyed copying books over and over and over again – the parts he loved were illustration and bookbinding.

That is perhaps the mental framework to adopt going forward: code syntax becomes a common language, a generalist view on the products we create becomes key, and we get to focus on the bits that actually matter.

That is, until you hit your usage limit.