news.ycombinator.com• 2d ago• 1 min read
Encoding Myself into the SystemLately, I’ve been thinking more seriously about what AI and automation may mean for my role as a software engineer.I’m a principal engineer at a large organization, and for more than a decade I’ve led a project that has always felt particularly close to me. I wrote nearly every line of code, aside from a handful of features built by interns over the years.What started as a single application gradually became an ecosystem: a library, APIs, an orchestration layer, CLIs, scheduled jobs, and more. Today, the organization depends on it in some way.That complexity did not appear all at once. It accumulated over years through new requirements, integrations, edge cases, architectural decisions, and changes in how the organization operates. Each layer solved a real problem, and the knowledge required to understand the system grew along with it.Eventually, it became too much for one person to manage while also building every downstream feature people requested. So I rearchitected much of it. I r