AI is removing the middle class of software engineering
The article describes how AI-generated code is overwhelming senior engineers, leading to massive pull requests and deteriorating code quality. It highlights that reliance on AI for design decisions creates architectural decay and makes systems hard to understand. The piece warns that this trend could undermine the middle class of software engineers if not addressed.
- ▪AI tools enable developers to produce large code changes quickly, resulting in pull requests with tens of thousands of lines of code.
- ▪Insufficient review and architectural oversight cause codebases to become messy and difficult to maintain.
- ▪Teams increasingly depend on AI explanations, yet often lack true understanding of the underlying systems.
- ▪The resulting complexity makes it hard to justify fixing the code and may lead to unsustainable development practices.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Blog - Florian Herrengt |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.florianherrengt.com/ai-removing-middle-class-software-engineering.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:20:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-12T13:41:36.930Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-12T13:41:36.930Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | d8ZqGhYnSr2g · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
It's 2020. You're the most senior person on your team, in charge of code quality and architecture. You've set up good engineering practices, you thoroughly review PRs from people who are less experienced than you and work hard to maintain a healthy codebase. Then at some point, you go on holiday. When you come back, the codebase is a mess. Everyone merged each other's PRs without really paying much attention, someone added a bunch of new tables to the database to denormalise it because it was easier and they added serverless or Kafka to the stack without any solid evidence that they needed either. It's okay. You can fix this. Fast forward to 2026. You haven't been on holiday. It's just a normal Monday morning.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Blog - Florian Herrengt.
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