For decades, software engineers were the disruptors. Now they’re the ones being disrupted.
AI code editors and vibe-coding tools have radically changed software engineering. Martin Casado has watched this happen; as general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, whose tagline is “software is eating the world,” Casado leads the venture capital firm’s $1.25 billion infrastructure practice, including its investment in Cursor.
On Jack Altman’s “Uncapped” podcast, Casado recounted his history in software since the 1990s — and how the industry is receiving its karma decades in the making.
“We disrupted everything, right?” Casado said of software engineers. “We disrupted the back office. We disrupted hotels. We disrupted everything.”
Casado said that recent changes due to AI represent “the first time I would say that we’re probably getting legitimately disrupted as a discipline.”
For many software engineers, AI has already changed how they do their work — and whether they can find a job in the first place. AI code editors like Cursor, Claude Code, and Replit are now industry standards. Leaders of Google and Meta have spoken openly about the density of code that is being written by AI.
“What it means to be a software engineer is changing pretty fundamentally,” Casado said. “I think it’s because of AI.”
But Casado was excited for the changes, not scared. “It’s kind of fun to actually be the disrupted for a change,” he said.
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Industry leaders have long been warning about the looming changes coming to software engineering.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that AI will be able to do the work of a midlevel engineer within this year.
For former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, coding boils down to two parts: production and creativity. As AI takes over the production piece, Dohmke said software engineers may be able to be more creative.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman has said that software engineers may be left as quality controllers. “So far, the vibe coding has actually taken a lot of code that is actually quite fun,” he said.
While Casado thought that software engineering was “changing pretty fundamentally,” he cautioned against overstating what AI in its current form can do.
In July, a METR study indicated that AI coding tools made some experienced developers less productive. The software engineers given AI tools in the study took 19% longer on average to complete tasks than those not using generative AI assistance.
“People conflate, ‘Oh this is dazzling’ with whether this is useful,” Casado said on the podcast. “These things are absolutely magic, but I think it makes it very hard to think clearly about the actual utility.”
