When tools like Windsurf make engineering “too easy,” what does that mean for the future of software?
I’m fully on the AI train.
Tonight, while working on a personal side project, I needed to stand up a couple of services. Like so often happens in engineering, I found myself building in parts of the codebase I hadn’t touched before. I had a vision and wanted to move fast.
For me, that meant creating a new Swagger endpoint to work with Firebase Auth. Normally, this would be a process of tracing logic, reverse-engineering structure, and carefully avoiding breakage. But this time, I remembered a tool a few colleagues had mentioned after attending Google Next: Windsurf.
I decided to give it a try.
Five Minutes to Flow
I opened the free version, pulled up the code, and typed:
“Add an endpoint that does X.”
Done. Flawless.
Swagger not updated?
“Can you add that too?”
Two seconds later — done again.
Five minutes in, I had a working service in a codebase I don’t live in day to day. The quality? Surprisingly solid. Clean, best practices, ready to go.
It was the kind of velocity that makes you stop for a second and wonder: is it supposed to be this easy?
When Abstraction Goes Too Far
There’s something both thrilling and unnerving about this shift. The friction is gone. The flow is real. But when so much of the thinking gets abstracted away, it raises questions:
- What happens to craftsmanship?
- How do we ensure teams stay grounded in fundamentals?
- Where’s the line between acceleration and dependency?
AI-assisted development isn’t about replacing thought — it’s about clearing the clutter so we can spend more time thinking about the right problems. But it’s on us as leaders to strike the balance.
The Leadership Takeaway
As tech leaders, our role is to find tools that reduce friction and amplify outcomes. Windsurf did that for me tonight in a way that was almost addictive. It makes you rethink what truly needs to be built by hand — and what doesn’t.
The future of engineering may not be about how fast we can write code, but how well we can guide the machines that write it with us.
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