The engineeringification of everything - by Ian Vanagas

Engineering has escaped the codebase. The pattern is everywhere now: design engineers shipping production code, GTM engineers automating sales workflows, sales engineers building implementation tooling. This isn't just title inflation - it's a fundamental shift in who gets to build and how work gets done. The shift follows a predictable loop. Tools get more powerful. Using them gets more complicated. Non-technical people learn anyway because engineering time is scarce and iteration speed matters. Skills accumulate and identity shifts. A new role crystallizes and startups hire for it explicitly. The loop restarts with better tools targeting the new identity.

What changed is LLMs making complex domain-specific tools accessible to non-engineers. People can now generate apps with Lovable or v0, automate GTM with Clay and Pocus, build workflows with PostHog and n8n. The capital flooding into AI-powered B2B SaaS for non-engineers - Sierra, Bolt.new, Decagon, Replit - improves the tools faster and markets harder to these emerging identities. You can see it in YC job posts where non-technical roles increasingly demand engineering skills.

The defining line of engineering is moving from "who is allowed to build" to "who has the ideas and dedication to actually build it." To some this looks like deprofessionalization - more self-taught practitioners, less depth, titles losing meaning. To many more it's a gain: more autonomy, faster iteration, better leverage to ship solutions to real problems. Non-technical people should embrace taking on engineering tasks because the tools exist and people like them are succeeding. Engineers should use the same tools to become full-stack shipping machines. Startups should build for these new types of engineers with APIs, machine-readable docs, MCP servers, and integrations. The billions invested here has to benefit someone.