[danans]

> I’m working on a program for myself and the overall architecture of the program as well as some parts of its implementation are clever and compose well to make the codebase a joy to work in. I am not simply “mapping features to mundane technical details”.

You said it: you are working on a "program for yourself". Hobbyist craft programming will always be here. The question is what kind of software engineering will be paid for, and a career can be built on.

I don't see much of a market for pure software engineers anymore. You also need to be a product manager, scientist, or have some other domain knowledge adjacent to software that relates to the real world.

I say this with empathy for those who just enjoyed the craft of designing and building software, and thought that alone would provide them a livelihood and career in perpetuity, but have found a big chunk of what they loved doing (and getting paid for) overtaken by AI coding agents.

[slopinthebag]

What I said equally applies to commercial software as well. It's pretty much the only way to build software which is extensible, maintainable, mostly bug-free, and performant. That companies often churn out slop isn't proof that it's unnecessary, it's evidence that it is.