Software engineers sharpen fundamentals as AI rewrites the profession
- Google has said 75% of its code is now written by AI, according to a July 2026 Guardian feature on US software engineers.
- More than 600,000 US tech workers have lost their jobs since ChatGPT was released in late 2022.
- US tech job postings on Indeed fell 36% between 2020 and 2025, with computer science graduate unemployment reaching 7% in 2024.
- Engineers profiled in the piece are sharpening fundamentals, learning to evaluate AI-generated code, organising collectively, or leaving the profession.
In July 2026, Technology | The Guardian published a portrait of how software engineers in the United States are responding to AI coding tools, and four words keep surfacing from the engineers it interviewed: adapt, evaluate, organise, or leave.
The numbers behind those choices are stark. Google has said that three-quarters of its code is now written by AI. More than 600,000 US tech workers have lost their jobs since ChatGPT appeared in late 2022. Unemployment among computer science graduates climbed to 7% in 2024, and tech job postings on Indeed fell 36% between 2020 and 2025. The profession employed roughly 1.5 million people at twice the median wage in 2022, a floor that has visibly shifted.
Against that backdrop, the engineers quoted are not waiting to be told what their work is for. The piece follows Matt, a New York commuter laid off and told to “use AI more”, who now hand-writes a browser-based video game in his spare time to keep his fundamentals honest. It also follows George Dover, a former Mailchimp engineer from Portland who worked as a substitute teacher and applied to around 400 roles before landing an AI-oriented position. Academics from King’s College London, the Wharton School, Brown and Harvard add a wider frame: that learning to read AI-generated code is becoming as core as writing it was.
What strikes us, reading this from a team that exists to help students, teachers and institutions use AI honestly, is that the engineers being interviewed are doing the same thing we keep asking of classrooms. They are not pretending the tools are not there, and they are not outsourcing their judgement to them either. They are practising the underlying skill, asking hard questions of the output, and treating the technology as a colleague with a known failure mode rather than as a substitute for thinking. That posture, rather than the tools themselves, is what looks like it will determine who comes through this transition well.
The honest part, which the article does not flinch from, is that this is happening to a profession that was, until very recently, a near-perfect bet on a degree. We suspect the lesson travels beyond it. The questions worth keeping turned over are not really about software engineering at all: they are about what we owe learners who are still being promised that fluency in the tools of the moment is the same thing as durable skill, and whether the institutions training them are preparing them for one cycle of work, or for the many that will follow.