LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
A senior engineer reflects on how LLMs are weakening the career value of hard-won expertise.
The author argues that LLMs are eroding three pillars of his software engineering career: domain knowledge, debugging skill, and architecture judgment. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, Codex, MCP, Sentry MCP, and DataDog MCP increasingly handle design, implementation, and difficult production bugs. The essay frames this as a labor-market concern, not just a tooling debate: if expertise becomes promptable, engineers may struggle to remain differentiated.
This article is a career reflection by a software engineer with 10 years of professional experience. The author moved from frontend to backend early on and has long worked in fields related to finance, accounting, and payment processing, accumulating knowledge of PCI compliance, double-entry bookkeeping, escrow, reconciliation, the payment lifecycle, and bank-transfer idempotency. He originally believed that this kind of domain understanding—which takes years of hands-on experience to form—was his differentiating advantage in the engineering market.
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