Over the past several months, as everyone everywhere seems to predict that software engineering will soon be done entirely by AI, I’ve been noticing things that suggest a very different story: that AI makes great software engineers more, not less, important. I can go as far as to say that for a startup, attracting great software engineers is much more important than having a great idea. It’s ultimately the talent that will define if the company succeeds or fails, and nowhere is it more true than in cyber.

What most in the industry don’t realize is that behind every successful security company is a software engineer you’ve never heard of. Palo Alto, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare - all these and most other security companies have people who envisioned, architected, and built their platforms without becoming widely known, and even without holding the CTO title. In this piece, I am sharing some of their stories.

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Software engineers turn a vision for security into a reality

I am well aware that when security professionals hear that software engineers are going to be defining the future of security, they quickly tune out, thinking, “Well, this idea hasn’t worked well for us in the past”. The whole “shift left” movement has failed everywhere except for the world’s most mature and tech-forward companies (and even there, the reality is rarely as awesome as BSides talks suggest). The idea that software engineers are going to get excited about doing security work has proven to be, at best, overly optimistic and, at worst, a somewhat delusional fantasy.

I am not here to argue that this is about to change. Instead, I want to talk about something else: the role software engineers play in defining the very direction of the security industry itself. In all these conversations about “developers using AI to ...