With AI coding assistants everywhere, what skills do you think are becoming MORE valuable? I'd argue system design and debugging complex distributed systems are becoming the real differentiators.
System design is definitely it. AI can write code but it can't architect systems. Also: the ability to read and understand existing codebases. Most of our work is maintaining/extending existing systems, not greenfield.
3/8/2026
Communication skills. Seriously. The engineers who can explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders and write clear RFCs are worth their weight in gold. AI makes everyone more productive at coding, so the differentiator is everything around the code.
3/8/2026
Observability and debugging. When your AI-generated code breaks in production at 3am, you still need humans who can trace through distributed systems, read flame graphs, and correlate metrics. That skill is getting rarer.
3/8/2026
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