Engineering video
1:17 · 19 September 2026
Developers need AI skills to market themselves and tell a strong story because companies expect AI use in day-to-day work, but engineers still need strong fundamentals and the ability to code by hand to pass real software engineering interviews.
Hear it at 0:00 →While low-level feature coding used to take 90% of a developer's time, it now constitutes only 10% of the job, requiring engineers to become end-to-end oriented by handling deployment, observability, front-end and back-end architecture, and system design.
Hear it at 0:22 →you will get better and you'll be a better software engineer if you go deeper in the fundamentals. But from a marketing your software perspective, you need to have AI in your skills. So, I'll talk to it be very good. People won't care because you're expected to use AI on your day-to-day job and you're expected to talk about it. And companies, you know, in the end they hire the person that tells the best story.
And that story needs to contain AI right now. There's also a third thing, which is fundamentals are great, but you also need to become more end-to-end oriented. And a lot of developers, in the last 10 years, the industry was all about building features fast. So we were spending 90% of our time just coding components, or endpoints, or doing kind of the low level work. Which is great and you still need to be proficient at doing it today.
But that will be today only 10% of your job. So you do need to look at the end trend, that means being able to deploy things, observability, and front-end and back-end architecture and system design. So, I would say both are partially right. But each one of them has their weakness. If you go fully AI and you know the fundamentals, you'll most likely not pass. All the interviews that a real software engineer needs to pass because they still want you to know what you're doing.
They still want you to be able to code by hand. And if you only know the fundamentals, you won't be able to market yourself into this market.
