The Death of the Glue Engineer: AI Is Absorbing the Work That Holds Systems Together
· 11 min read
Every engineering organization has them. They don't own a product. They don't ship features users see. But without them, nothing works. They're the engineers who write the ETL pipeline that moves data from the billing system to the analytics warehouse. The ones who build the webhook handler that keeps Salesforce in sync with the internal CRM. The ones who maintain the API adapter layer that lets the mobile app talk to three different backend services that were never designed to talk to each other.
They are the glue engineers, and their work is the first category of software engineering being fully absorbed by AI agents.
