Windsurf's head of product engineering says a successful software engineer is proficient in these 3 skill categories

Business Insider

16 hours ago

Windsurf's head of product engineering believes proficiency in three key areas makes a successful software engineer — coding, research, and "metalearning."
Technical fundamentals are first and foremost, Windsurf's Kevin Hou said in a presentation at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco.
"If we zoom out and think about what makes you all software engineers successful, there are a couple of different categories. The first of which — coding-related. File reads, running terminal commands, seeing your history, even which tabs you have open inside of your editor. This all informs how to generate the correct code."
Following that, there's knowing how to seek support from external sources, Hou added.
"Things like going onto GitHub and viewing a past history of commits, maybe looking at a PR that is doing something similar to the feature you're about to implement, doing online searches, web searches, looking at documentation," he said.
And finally, there's "metalearning," the Windsurf product engineering head said, which he believes separates the veteran coders from the newbies.
"It's the idea of what separates a junior engineer from a senior engineer, from a staff engineer," he said. "These are the organizational best practices, the engineering preferences, that all get encoded into what makes good code."
Windsurf, which produces AI coding tools for developers and was recently acquired by OpenAI for a reported $3 billion, aims to emulate all the aspects that make up the process of a particularly capable programmer, Hou said. Most of what human engineers do now, he added, the company seeks to automate — eventually making it so people are only responsible for the final approval.
"We know it's not enough just to read," he said. "We need to be able to do and write everything. We need to be able to do it all for you. And so the AI has to take action on a wide variety of surfaces beyond just the coding surface, in order to accomplish what a human software engineer would do."
Windsurf is ultimately looking to make software engineering "99% agent and 1% human," Hou added.
"And as more and more of these timelines and workflows become AI-powered, it becomes possible to have Windsurf working for you at all times," he said. "Not only as you type and use autocomplete and tab, but also in the background — researching when you're working, fully in parallel, only asking you to approve."
Windsurf did not respond to a request for additional comment by Business Insider prior to publication.
As AI-assisted coding becomes increasingly popular, companies have already begun to hire fewer human employees. Early-career workers in the tech sphere have been hit particularly hard. In an ideal world, though, Hou said Windsurf will help make programming a more accessible process, not one that's devoid of people entirely.
"We want to build this future where you can code anytime, you can write software at any time," Hou said.