An entirely personal and somewhat uncomfortable opinion about software engineering in 2026.
Today I was looking into the cost of AI-powered code reviews with Claude. Around $15–25 per substantial review. That's quite a price, especially in Europe, where engineering salaries are not exactly Silicon Valley material.
And what are we buying?
Mostly technical analysis, detached from the real-world context. AI can find bugs, identify edge cases, and occasionally discover something genuinely important. It can also produce a beautifully articulated hypothetical problem that requires another AI session to translate from Claudish into English.
Sometimes the complexity of explaining a finding is itself a good indication that nobody will ever encounter it.
But here's the question: Who remains the last guardian of every important merge request?
Still humans.
Someone must understand the business context, accept responsibility, make a decision, and eventually own whatever breaks in production. Even with excellent AI tools, organizing a proper review process remains surprisingly difficult.
And this brings us to our hero.
Enter Nestor, King of Pylos
In Homer's Iliad, Nestor is the oldest and wisest of the Greek warrior-kings. A respected veteran, always ready to advise younger warriors, usually after a lengthy introduction explaining how much better everything was in his youth.
Every software organization has its own Nestors.
Ten to twenty years of experience. Knows the sacred codebase. Remembers why that strange workaround was introduced in 2014. Can explain why the team should never use that particular database again.
His working day might include reviewing zero to two merge requests, attending a few meetings, and progressing on some architectural or technical-debt initiative with a timeline measured in weeks, certainly not hours.
And for a long time, this was a perfectly reasonable arrangement.
Software engineering was a profession with an interesting economic balance. Take the Dutch market, for example: an average software engineer earns around 53% of a doctor's salary, 138% of an electrical engineer's, and 176% of a teacher's.
Yet unlike doctors, engineers rarely carried personal responsibility for someone's life. Unlike teachers, they had relatively little direct exposure to the people consuming their services.
A fairly comfortable working environment, good compensation, and sometimes an employer still trying to convince everyone to visit the office by providing free coffee.
Not a bad deal for the defenders of Olympus.
The first cracks in the temple
Somewhere between 2018 and 2024, Nestor began losing one of his most important sources of job security: exclusive knowledge.
Documentation as code became fashionable. Internal developer platforms became more accessible. Backstage, Argo CD, infrastructure as code, and standardised delivery pipelines gradually turned sacred operational rituals into something ordinary engineers could understand and operate.
Knowledge started moving from people's heads into systems.
But Nestor survived.
After all, becoming an experienced engineer still required years of education, five to ten years of professional experience, and at least a year or two of understanding a particular business domain.
Even with excellent documentation, expertise wasn't free.
You still had to learn, remember, practice, and occasionally discover that the technology you spent three years mastering was now deprecated.
Meanwhile, interviews demanded LeetCode exercises, system-design performances, and other rituals seemingly invented by Greek gods to punish mortals for choosing computer science.
The profession was difficult enough to justify its privileges.
Or so we told ourselves.
The comfortable years
Of course, there were outstanding engineers, people whose experience saved organisations millions and prevented disasters nobody even knew were possible.
But there were others.
Veterans who had gradually lost interest in the business, developed near-zero tolerance for their internal customers, and learned to hide questionable productivity behind architecture discussions, technical debt, and mysterious engineering concerns.
Every organization has a few demons that nobody can defeat.
Technical debt is particularly convenient because it is both absolutely real and infinitely expandable.
No product owner can easily challenge an engineer who announces that the architecture is becoming unsustainable.
And so our heroes continued guarding the gates.
Sometimes they were protecting the organisation.
Sometimes they were protecting their comfort.
Usually a little of both.
Then Prometheus brought another fire
And here we are in 2026.
Frontier AI models can generate merge requests against previously sacred codebases, analyse legacy architectures, explain unfamiliar dependencies, and propose changes in minutes.
Things that once required a senior engineer spending several days reading code are increasingly accessible to anyone who knows how to ask good questions and verify the answers.
The tools aren't perfect. Far from it.
But perfection was never the requirement for disrupting a profession.
Being useful enough, cheap enough, and improving faster than the established workflow is already dangerous.
An energetic junior or mid-level developer using AI effectively can sometimes deliver ten times the visible output of a veteran who refuses to change.
Of course, ten times more code isn't ten times more value. Sometimes it's ten times more trouble.
But the productivity difference is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
And Nestor?
Nestor opens the merge request, examines the generated code, and offers his wisdom:
"You could use Integer here instead of Long."
Thank you, mighty king of Pylos.
We have spent months tuning our AI review tools to produce fewer low-value comments. And now you are doing it manually.
The oracle has entered the meeting
Naturally, Nestor eventually starts using AI too.
Not necessarily because he believes in it, but because using AI tools has become mandatory for engineers who want to remain competitive.
Yet something fundamental has changed.
Previously, the veteran was the source of technical knowledge. Junior engineers approached him for answers, architectural explanations, and guidance through the labyrinth.
Today, a well-prepared session with a frontier model, connected to the codebase, documentation, and relevant MCP servers, can sometimes provide better technical consultancy than an experienced engineer.
It doesn't get tired.
It doesn't complain that the question was already answered in a meeting in 2021.
And it doesn't begin with a fifteen-minute lecture about why microservices were a mistake.
The veteran is no longer automatically the oracle.
Increasingly, he is an interpreter, validator, and decision-maker standing between the oracle and reality.
That is an important job.
But it's a different job.
And perhaps the most uncomfortable realisation is that the value of knowing something is falling faster than the value of understanding what matters.
The last guardians
The good news is that the promised lights-out software factories remain largely a fantasy. Generating software and operating a reliable business are very different things.
Someone must still understand customers, negotiate requirements, manage risks, make trade-offs, and take responsibility when production catches fire at 3 AM.
The bad news is that technical expertise alone offers less job security than it once did. Business understanding, communication, judgement, and accountability are becoming more valuable relative to the ability to write sophisticated code.
What we used to call soft skills may turn out to be some of the hardest things to automate.
Nestor's old authority came from knowing things others didn't. His new authority must come from understanding what matters, making decisions, and taking responsibility for their consequences.
The gods have changed the rules
I don't believe software engineering is disappearing. But some of the privileges and professional habits we became accustomed to are being challenged, perhaps not entirely without reason.
For years, technical complexity translated into high compensation, autonomy, and job security. Sometimes the value delivered justified all three. Sometimes complexity itself became the justification.
Now Nestor must change.
Can the industry motivate that change with higher salaries? Perhaps. But looking at the current European market dynamics, the trend hardly seems encouraging.
Is high cognitive load still an asset worth managing, rather than something to avoid through isolation, endless procrastination, and technical distractions? Most probably yes.
The profession may increasingly reward those willing to carry that cognitive load: understanding messy business realities, making uncomfortable decisions, and accepting responsibility rather than hiding behind technical expertise.
The future is far less obvious than it seemed two years ago.
Nestor may remain the wisest warrior in the Greek army. But wisdom is no longer demonstrated by remembering how battles were fought twenty years ago.
It is demonstrated by helping win the battle happening today.
And somewhere on Olympus, the gods have already opened another pull request.
No reviewers assigned.
