On Being an Engineer in 2026

# Summary Engineers remain valuable in 2026 despite AI agents handling much of coding, writing, and debugging work, as evidenced by the persistent performance gap between exceptional and average engineers. Human leverage stems from abilities AI agents lack: defining problems accurately, intuiting appropriate solution complexity, considering long-term implications, and possessing tacit knowledge that cannot be easily articulated or replicated. The author argues that human consciousness and emergent properties from lived experience—rather than explicit rules—explain why engineers haven't become obsolete despite three years of predictions to the contrary.