Engineering Mindset

Sam Altman recently said something that caught my attention: “Don’t learn to code.” Instead, he says, learn high agency, soft skills, and idea generation. I think he’s half right—and half dangerously wrong. Yes, high agency, soft skills, and idea generation matter. They mattered before the LLM era, and they still matter now. No argument there. But telling people to stop learning to code? That is the most dangerous advice in tech right now. ...

“So, what kind of engineer are you?” “I’m a Python engineer.” Every time I hear this, I cringe a little. Not because Python isn’t amazing—it absolutely is. But because somewhere along the way, we’ve started defining ourselves by our tools instead of our craft. I’m sure you’ve heard it too: “I am an AWS engineer,” “I am a React developer,” as if the tool has become their entire professional identity. ...