Most Software Engineering -ilities Are Becoming Irrelevant in the Age of AI

For decades, engineering has been shaped around a set of principles that we rarely question. Maintainability, testability, modularity, and reusability have been treated as foundational qualities of good systems. They are deeply embedded in how we design architectures, review code, and evaluate technical decisions. The assumption behind them is simple: if we optimize for these qualities, we will build systems that last longer, scale better, and are easier to evolve. But that assumption was built