If your definition of “real coding” is “I personally typed every line,” that definition is going to die
Heat trend
The percentage is based on available heat signal, not comment count or independent people.
This covers a coding tool or code-capability update — useful for developers assessing workflow changes and reusable value.
I do not think AI coding makes engineering obsolete.
I do think it makes one old definition of engineering obsolete: equating professional legitimacy with manually producing the implementation.
Typing code is a means, not the outcome.
If ChatGPT/Codex generates a function and I understand the contract, inspect the diff, test the edge cases, verify the integration and own the failure when it breaks, the meaningful engineering question is not who emitted the first draft of the tokens.
The meaningful question is whether the resulting system is correct.
The “AI slop” criticism is valid when people skip that ownership. Prompt once, never read the code, deploy it, then act shocked when it fails — yes, that is garbage.
But a senior engineer using generation as leverage is a completely different workflow.
The irony is that AI should increase the value of experienced judgment. The faster code appears, the more important it becomes to know what should exist, what should never exist, and how to prove the difference.
If an engineer’s entire competitive advantage was memorizing syntax and moving boilerplate around faster than everyone else, that advantage is shrinking.
If the advantage was systems thinking, debugging, architecture, product judgment and verification, these tools can amplify it.