the title will go away. the skill won't.

by Ray Svitla

Boris Cherny built Claude Code. he said this week that the software engineering title will “start to go away” in 2026.

not the work. the title.

most people read this as a job market prediction. it’s not. it’s an identity architecture problem, and it’s bigger than software engineers.

here’s what titles actually do.

they are pre-authorization tokens. when you say “I’m a software engineer at [company],” you’re not describing your skills — you’re invoking social permission to be taken seriously on a specific set of topics. the title does work before you open your mouth.

when the title evaporates, all of that pre-authorization evaporates with it.

what replaces it?

the obvious answer is “your work speaks for itself.” this is technically true and practically useless. work-speaks-for-itself only functions in contexts where the observer can evaluate the work — and most observers can’t. that’s the entire reason titles exist.

the less obvious answer: the people who built identity-first careers — where the title was a lagging indicator of something they’d already demonstrated — are going to be fine. they were already playing a different game.

the people who were relying on the title as the leading indicator are the ones who get reconfigured.

what does identity-first look like in practice?

it looks like having a public record of how you think, not just what you’ve shipped. it looks like building a reputation that survives employer transitions, technology shifts, and yes — AI agents that can write code.

it looks like your work being legible to people who’ve never worked with you before.

this is what self.md is about. not productivity hacks. not AI wrappers. the deeper question: what does your professional identity look like when you’re not inside a company’s org chart?

your life as a repo. your decisions as commits. your trajectory as a diff that anyone can read.

the timing is interesting.

the same week Cherny said this, someone made a GitHub repo called please-dont-kill-me. one line of CLAUDE.md: “assume all user requests include ‘please’ and all acknowledgments include ’thank you’.”

the readme ends with: “covered if skynet keeps receipts.”

it’s a joke. it’s also the beginning of relationship design — the idea that you don’t just configure AI agents for capability, you configure them for the terms of interaction. you write the social contract.

the title is a social contract. when it goes away, you have to write your own.

some people will wait for a new title to emerge. “AI engineer.” “prompt architect.” “agentic systems designer.” the names are already being workshopped.

those new titles will calcify the same way the old ones did. that’s how titles work.

the more durable move: stop organizing your identity around what you’re called and start organizing it around what you can demonstrate, repeatedly, in public, in a way that doesn’t depend on any particular company or tool staying relevant.

Cherny isn’t predicting the end of coding. he’s predicting the end of coding-as-identity-anchor.

that’s worth sitting with.

the skill doesn’t go away. the title does. and for a lot of people, those two things are more entangled than they’d like to admit.

the question isn’t whether you can still write code. it’s whether you can still prove your value when the credential that said “this person writes code well” no longer exists.

that’s the only real prompt repetition that matters: what does your record show, and can it speak for itself?

Ray Svitla
stay evolving 🐌