Engineer was almost never appropriate before. Very few people writing software ever measured anything or innovated anything new. Now, if you are not writing code I cannot imagine how developer would be appropriate.
For people who just feed agents I would use the title: trainer.
This is what I think: we will go through all of these other titles and then come back to software engineer (e.g. remember Prompt Engineer?).
The reason IMO is that true software engineering hasn’t been about producing code. It’s about solving problems by building maintainable systems. The best software engineers don’t only build for the feature, they build for the extensibility, maintainability, and scalability of the feature. That is the art of engineering software that I think we can still take pride in even during this AI era.
Quite a few years ago, Erik Dietrich proposed "efficiencer": https://daedtech.com/starting-tech-firm-efficiencer/
I've always liked that term and it's more fitting than ever.
I've been using "Mad Computer Scientist" for 26 years now as my official title.
Engineer was almost never appropriate before. Very few people writing software ever measured anything or innovated anything new. Now, if you are not writing code I cannot imagine how developer would be appropriate.
For people who just feed agents I would use the title: trainer.
This is what I think: we will go through all of these other titles and then come back to software engineer (e.g. remember Prompt Engineer?).
The reason IMO is that true software engineering hasn’t been about producing code. It’s about solving problems by building maintainable systems. The best software engineers don’t only build for the feature, they build for the extensibility, maintainability, and scalability of the feature. That is the art of engineering software that I think we can still take pride in even during this AI era.
I think the value is shifting: it's moving from actually building the thing to deciding what to build: Product Engineer?
Enabler
Agent Babysitter
Developtisaurus
Software Whisperers
code jockey / code monkey
Solutions engineer. You’re solving problems with a non deterministic natural language compiler, context in, code out.
In 95% of all cases - slopper/clanker.