Software Engineering Is Becoming Civil Engineering — CMU Lecture Thesis

Christopher Meiklejohn / Hacker News·low signal

Christopher Meiklejohn argues from a CMU guest lecture that software engineering is undergoing the same transition building went through in the 18th century, when structural design separated from craft construction. With AI handling 'write correct programs,' the remaining human role is platform engineering: designing database schemas for multi-tenancy, deployment pipelines, and abstraction layers. The best engineers will spend their day designing systems that make it safe for anyone to ship features.