Image by Manueldesign20 from Pixabay
It’s hard to believe that 2026 is already halfway and the summer is upon us. When I look back at what happens now, I still think that the best time to be a software engineer is now. We get so many cool tools to work with that we do not want to stop working. The technology is becoming more powerful and our expertise is needed increasingly often.
First, we need to design software. Maybe I’m biased because of the topic of my PhD, but this is what I really like doing: getting dirty with the code and the design. Now, I can do more of that, reducing my frustrations with defects to zero. Why should I care? Claude and Codex can fix that for me! Ok, I do exaggerate, they are not perfect and sometimes I just need to rewrite the code myself, but hey, I can still do it.
Second, we need to define intents and specifications. That part is not my favorite because it means more requirements. Requirements are not something that I particularly like. There is nothing wrong with them; it’s just not my cup of tea (or coffee, choose the beverage of your liking). Now, I can work with requirements a bit more because I have the AI to help me with them. I do not need to work so much with the form; I can focus on what I want. So, I’ve learned meta-prompting and meta-specifications, which are really cool.
Third, we need to create guardrails – functional, development, non-functional. I’ve worked on a cool project together with my students and one of the companies, which opened up my eyes to just how important guardrails are. I’ve also realized how cool it is to work with them – it’s like setting prerequisites for learning for someone else, but that someone else is software. Take a look at our example and, if you like it contribute: https://github.com/miroslawstaron/elevator_runtime_guardrail_simple
Finally, we can learn faster because the new tools provide us with the right support for that. No more StackOverflow or community questions, we have Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Antigravity, you name it, that help us learn new things. They can even write things for us in the right format – you like a book chapter, here it comes; you like a paper, no problem at all; or maybe just a PowerPoint with some examples, we can do that too.
I’m looking forward to what the next year brings and how we will tackle new challenges. OpenAI usually releases things in the summer, so I hope to see something really new and cool now.
Have a great summer!
