“If you don’t get the requirements right, it doesn’t matter how well you execute the rest of the project.”—Karl Wiegers, Ten Cosmic Truths About Software Requirements
Every word Karl writes is gold. That man knows more about Requirements Engineering than anyone and has made a career of helping Requirements Engineers become better.
I use both Grammarly and ChatGPT multiple times every day. They are different tools. Grammarly proofreads and edits existing text. ChatGPT creates text from a prompt. Grammarly often finds minor grammatical errors in ChatGPT-generated text.
AI will reshape software engineering, but it won’t eliminate it. The boring stuff, such as coding, routine QA, and documentation, is bounded and pattern-heavy, so AI will eat that first.
The real bottleneck has never been typing. It’s figuring out who the stakeholders are, what they need, and why. That’s messy, political, and brutally hard to automate. For most products, the critical work is defining the problem, not writing the solution.
That kind of work requires soft skills, requirements engineering, deep domain knowledge, and prompt engineering. It’s also much harder to outsource, because deep language and cultural awareness are critical.
If you want to future-proof your career, focus on being really good at understanding and defining the problem to be solved.
Although there is lots of hype, vibe-coding isn't a marketing gimmick—it's just continuing the trend we've always followed: moving to higher levels of abstraction. Like going from assembler to C made life better by letting us focus on logic instead of registers, vibe-coding means taking that next leap, writing code that directly captures 'what' rather than 'how.' When the specification becomes executable, there's less room for misinterpretation and fewer bugs, and your mental effort can shift from managing low-level details to clearly expressing your intent. It's not magic; it's just the natural evolution toward clearer, safer, and more maintainable code. It's not there yet, but, just as C++ replaced C which replaced assembler, "specification as code" is the future for most software. Eventually, most of us will be "prompt engineers" rather than "software engineers".
“They can’t buy from you until they are in your store.”
Unless you have a long list of eager clients, an initial meeting is about selling your expertise rather than assessing the client. For many potential customers, especially those on the fence, even a small fee will discourage them from reaching out. Instead, consider making the first meeting free and using it to showcase your value, win clients, and get referrals.
FRET was developed by the NASA Ames Research Center to specify safety-critical applications whose failure could result in loss of life, significant property damage, or environmental harm. However, since it is open-source software, FRET is available to anyone who wants to create precise, unambiguous requirements for their applications. Version 3 was released on Aug 30.
Every word Karl writes is gold. That man knows more about Requirements Engineering than anyone and has made a career of helping Requirements Engineers become better.