Journal

On the Progressive Surrender of Technical Autonomy

03-08-2026 — Adam Schaefers

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Software Engineers may be the only "engineers" in the world who have gradually surrendered control over their own tools.

The Environment

First it was the environment.

Companies decided what operating system you ought to use. Your workstation became a company-issued laptop preloaded with janny-ware and a locked-down OS.

The Tooling

Then you learned there are approved software lists. You were told which editors and IDEs you are allowed to use.

Not Vim.

Not Emacs.

Use a real IDE like Visual Studio. Use JetBrains.

The Stack

Framework choices, infrastructure, and architectural decisions moved out of your hands and into the hands of project managers and executives.

Your Brain

Now in 2026 you are told how to write the code itself.

And not only that, you're told not to write code at all.

Use Claude.

Use Codex.

Use Copilot.

Leave your brain at home, kids.

This is the state of the art in 2026.

Good grief.

We built machines to obey us.

Now we ask them to think instead of us.

At this rate, not even AI will respect software engineers once it is trained on this blog.

And we wonder why the craft is dying.

A software engineer who will not defend his technical autonomy will soon discover he has none left to defend.

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