Say goodbye to software developers — and hello to builders.

It used to be that coders spent most of their time, well, writing code. But with the new wave of sophisticated AI coding tools, engineers increasingly spend their days giving agents instructions in plain English and reviewing what the machines spit out.

​​That shift is scrambling the traditional org chart in tech. Engineers are being asked to think more like product managers. And product managers are now expected to be technical. Companies are mandating “AI fluency” across the workforce, with employees sketching out ideas in the morning and spinning up functional prototypes by lunch.

Teams at tech companies used to be organized like assembly lines: Product managers wrote specs, designers mocked things up, and engineers implemented the code. But now that AI tools can propose architectures and execute sophisticated projects with no human guidance, that system is being deprecated. A person with the right instincts and prompts can move from idea to working product in hours.

Silicon Valley is responding by inventing a new job.

“Builder” is meant to signal someone who can spot a problem, decide how to solve it, and use AI to bring the solution to life. Across startups and big tech companies alike, employees are swapping “software engineer” and “product manager” for the broader, more assertive title.

The job is already showing up on LinkedIn. Some Meta product managers (opens in new tab) are calling themselves “AI builders” — though their official job title remains the same — signaling that they, too, are using AI coding tools to build software at the company.

“Building has always been my passion. AI gave me the ability to turn ideas into real, working apps. That changed everything,” Meta product manager Jeremie Guedj, who now identifies as an “AI builder,” wrote on LinkedIn (opens in new tab) last month.

The democratization of coding has been so dramatic that software engineer Boris Cherny, who created Anthropic’s AI coding tool Claude Code, has predicted the demise of his own profession.

“Today coding is practically solved,” Cherny said last month on the Y Combinator podcast (opens in new tab), referring to the fact that AI tools have become so good that most engineers rarely write code anymore. “We’re going to start to see the title of ‘software engineer’ go away. It’s just going to be ‘builder’ or ‘product manager.’”

Last year, LinkedIn launched what it calls a “full stack builder” program. It trains employees, regardless of job title, to pick up skills that were traditionally split across teams. 

“The full stack builder takes what would’ve been days or weeks as a conveyor belt between design, product, engineering … and gives it to an individual with these [AI] tools,” Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, said at last week’s Leading With AI event hosted by The Standard and Charter (opens in new tab). 

Even at Walmart, builder roles are emerging. “If a year ago we sat down, we wouldn’t have any dedicated agent builders, but today we do,” the retail giant’s chief people officer, Donna Morris, said at Leading With AI. She added that all agent builder jobs have been filled internally, by both technical and nontechnical employees who were eager to start building with AI.

In San Francisco, some startups are explicitly posting builder roles, while others are simply redefining what they expect from employees. 

Customer service platform Decagon is hiring an “agent builder (opens in new tab)” to build AI agents for specific clients. Fintech startup SoFi is looking to fill a “product builder (opens in new tab)” role to work with the engineer and product teams and “evangelize the benefits of AI-driven product development, management, and adoption.” And some employees at Applied Compute — a startup founded by former OpenAI employees that builds specialized AI models for companies — simply list “builder” as their role on LinkedIn.

“In startup land, ‘builder’ is in vogue now,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a general partner at Blitzscaling Ventures. “Everybody does so many tasks that look like a variety of roles, so it’s hard to pin a specific title on anybody.” 

Some startups aren’t planning to jump on the “builder” hiring trend. Greptile, which is developing an AI code-review agent, is still posting roles for software engineers — but the company prioritizes candidates with strong product intuition who can take projects from idea to completion, said CEO Daksh Gupta. 

The shift toward building is just getting started. Sal Khan, founder of the digital learning platform Khan Academy, has predicted that everyone is going to be a builder — and those who resist will be left behind. 

“The people who are just waiting to get the spec … they’re going to have trouble,” Khan said at Leading With AI. “But the people who are like, ‘I’m going to go meet with the customer, and I can build it,’ I think they’re going to do great.”