Software engineer (SWE) is basically playing Factorio in a terminal right now.

If you use agentic AI, you know exactly what this means. We went from manual artisans to automation supervisors.

In Factorio, you build machines and conveyor belts to automate everything.

In our terminals, we now do the same: we give a prompt and watch the AI autonomously grep, read, edit, and run tests. Terminal logs are the new conveyor belts.

Our job has completely changed :

⤫  Typing code manually
✓  Managing AI context & API budgets
✓  Unblocking the AI when it loops
✓  Breaking down big tasks into automated agent pipelines

We are no longer coders.
We are algorithmic factory managers