My name is Benjamin Grosse, and I’ve been a software engineer for a really long time. Like, since it took fifteen 3.5" disks and three hours to install Windows 3.11.
I still remember the magic I felt learning how to program. And even after all these years, I still feel the thrill of coding: making something amazing out of thoughts and symbols on the screen.
Now here we are in 2025, in a future I couldn’t have imagined. Many are predicting that AI coding agents are going to replace all software developers. Some are deeply discouraged and disheartened at the prospect of being rendered irrelevant.
I have great sympathy for their distress. But if I’m honest, I’m more excited than ever about building software! I believe the future of software development belongs not to autonomous AI bots, but to engineers like you and me who have learned to wield AI to exponentially leverage our creative power.
I’m not talking about vibe coding, where you tell the AI what to build and you don’t really care about the code it generates as long as the solution works. That’s fun and entertaining—until it isn’t (IYKYK!).
I’m talking about building serious, production-level software products with codebases that can stand the test of time. The art of effectively using AI in that world is still a wild west frontier. The tools, techniques, systems, and best practices are all evolving every day as the pioneers in the space pull the future forward.
And that is why I started this newsletter. There are many brilliant minds and innovative teams out there exploring this frontier, and it can be very hard to keep up with the progress.
The Leveraged Engineer Weekly tracks the cutting edge of this space and surfaces it to you each week so that you don’t have to rot your brain scrolling X, Reddit, and Hacker News just trying to find the nuggets here and there.
Come along with me and be part of the future of software engineering!
—-Benjamin Grosse