Let’s be honest: nowadays, everybody says they are AI-First.
AI-First Engineer. AI-First Designer. AI-First this. AI-First that. I mean, I get it, it’s the trend, it’s the job market speaking. AI is everywhere (what do you read in the above image now?).
Here’s the thing: I’ve been using AI since 2022. That’s four years now. And I never once thought of it as “AI-First”. To me, it was just… a tool. A very good autocomplete. A brainstorming partner. A second pair of eyes for code review. I wrote my own code, and AI helped me refine it.
So, when everyone started slapping “AI-First” on their LinkedIn title, I didn’t feel like I fit in that bucket. I wasn’t orchestrating agentic AI fleets to conquer the world. I was just using AI as a smart assistant on the side.
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em
A few months ago, something shifted.
I started noticing it in the job postings at first. Everyone wants someone who can orchestrate AI agents, not just use them as an autocomplete engine. The market is literally screaming for AI.
So I thought… fine. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Let’s see what this AI-first approach actually looks like in practice.
I started experimenting. Multiple tools, multiple approaches. Most of them were… fine. Useful, but nothing that really changed my life or how I worked.
Then I tried OpenCode with the Oh-My-OpenCode plugin.
And I was astonished.
Well, small disclaimer here: I was astonished when using it with good AI models like Claude Opus. Otherwise, it’s pretty similar to all the other tools.
An Agentic AI Fleet
What makes this combination special isn’t just one feature, it’s the overall architecture. You’re not talking to a single AI. You’re working with a fleet: multiple agents, multiple sub-agents, multiple workers all coordinated to tackle whatever task you throw at them.
I’ll not go into the details, but I’ve been using it with Claude Opus 4.6, and it works like a charm. I give it a prompt, like for example “rebuild my website following this design” (please do notice the “following this design” part, it will come in handy later on in the post), and the fleet divides the work, executes in parallel, coordinates, reviews, and ships.
Left to my own devices, rebuilding this site would have taken me days. With the AI? A few hours.
The orchestration layer that Oh-My-OpenCode provides on top of OpenCode is what makes it click. It’s not just “AI writes code”. It’s “AI manages a team that writes, reviews, and ships code”.
And that’s where it gets really interesting.
What This Means for My Job
Yeah, I mean, let’s get philosophical.
I now genuinely believe that simple coding tasks like boilerplate, standard CRUD, straightforward features, etc. will be automated by AI in a few years. No question. Like, no question at all.
But wait, before firing everyone in your company (yes, I’m looking at you, C-level executives), let’s just add that I don’t think engineers are going away. At least, not the ones who can think, architect, and guide.
Why? Because AI still can’t do good reasoning. Not really. It can simulate it, generate convincing outputs, but when it comes to truly understanding why something should be built a certain way, why a trade-off matters in a specific context, why this architecture will scale and that one won’t, that’s still human territory (remember the “following this design” part before?).
My job title hasn’t changed. I’m still a Software Engineer. It’s what that means day-to-day that’s shifting.
I used to write code. Now I architect AI to write code for me.
I used to be the builder, getting my hands dirty. Now, I’m the orchestrator of the actual builders.
Ever played Overlord? That’s how I feel now (without the evil part of course).
Thinking About the Industrial Revolution Analogy
Old topic, everyone wrote about this I think. I’ll keep it short.
As you know, during the industrial revolution, craftsmanship didn’t disappear: it evolved. The skilled artisan who made every chair by hand was displaced, yes. But the people who understood chairs, who could design them, who knew materials and ergonomics and aesthetics, they adapted. They became designers, engineers, factory planners.
The chair was still there. The craft of making it was industrialized.
Software is heading the same way. The “chair”, i.e. the working software product, will still exist. But the craft of writing every line of code will be industrialized. Automated. AI-Driven.
Engineers who adapt will become the designers and architects of this new industrial era. The ones who can’t or won’t adapt…
I don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say: in five years, the title “Software Engineer” as we know it will mean something fundamentally different. Maybe it already does.
This Website as a Proof of Concept
Right now, AI cannot build a website by its own, that’s been obvious for a while. Why? Because it’s struggling with UI, UX, behavior and more in general, it’s stuck on empty templates without a soul or idea behind them.
So, it’s obvious that AI didn’t do everything for me. I re-built this website with AI. Remember, the orchestration layer, the human brain directing the fleet. This is the real skill now.
99% of this site was generated by AI. I gave prompts. I reviewed. I guided. I made the decisions that mattered. The AI did the rest.
And honestly? It looks better than what I would have built on my own. More consistent. More polished. More designed, because I could focus on what I wanted rather than getting lost in the weeds of CSS and HTML.
So, About This Post
Of course I wrote this post with the help of AI!
Not because I’m lazy, though I’ll admit it’s nice to offload the actual typing, but because this is the point. I thought it, I guided it, I reviewed it. The words on the page are 99% AI-generated, but the ideas, the structure, the reason you’re reading this in the first place. That’s all me.
Call it AI-first if you want. I call it the natural evolution of being a software engineer in 2026.
The industrial revolution didn’t kill craftsmanship. It elevated it.
Well, it also displaced a lot of workers and cost many lives. Don’t forget that.
Let’s see where this takes us.