A figure seen from behind, the back of the head showing, sits alone at a desk writing a letter by lamplight, while in the workshop beyond small robots assemble a large machine at a row of workbenches and an empty stool stands beside a plan of the whole machine pinned to the wall, the whole scene drawn with wide empty margins on every side.

shubs.io

do we still enjoy software engineering in the age of AI?

Shubham Shah · 26 September 2026

Company story · roles · Understanding the work

Takeaway

Shubham Shah, co-founder of the company Assetnote, published an engineer's message about losing satisfaction since the team moved to coding with AI, and his reply as their manager.

Summary

An engineer at Assetnote, a company with security research and engineering teams, told their manager that the work had lost its satisfaction since the team began developing with AI. They no longer fully understood the code they shipped, and had lost touch with the codebase and with what colleagues were doing. Shubham Shah, a security researcher and Assetnote co-founder, published the message and his reply with details removed.

Key points

The engineer did not object to AI writing code. The loss was in understanding the whole project and taking responsibility for what they shipped.
Shah agreed that working with AI has turned engineers into something like middle managers, and wrote that he felt the same loss in his own research.
He suggested putting standing rules in the instruction file that an AI coding agent reads with every request, because the agent's memory feature kept ignoring them.
He proposed that the team present its work to restore pride in it, and said he would not push the engineer while they adjusted.

Implication

When engineers code with AI agents, they can lose track of the codebase and of each other's work, and a manager can raise this openly with the team. This application beyond Shah's team is an inference and is not the author's claim.

Suggested actions

Engineering

Once AI agents write most of the code, have engineers present their finished work to the team, so that each keeps pride in the work and knows what colleagues build.

Engineering

Put the rules an AI coding agent keeps forgetting into the instruction file it reads with every request, such as CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, instead of relying on its memory feature.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: We can try and make the team present their work as the development pace goes faster to try and revive that pride in their work, and showing people how they did their best towards something (AI or not), and I do really want to build this sort of culture.

Source issue

26 September 2026: when agents can finish whole tasks, teams redesign the work, the checks and the roles around them.