After four years as a sales engineer, I switched back to software engineering. The bosses at Bitrise are good people, and they graciously let me do an internal transfer.

Why did I switch back?

This is not a complicated answer. LLMs and the agents that use them have utterly transformed software development, and I want to experience this first-hand. How can I continue to be relevant as a sales engineer for developer tools if I am not hands on with this new way of building?

I must also say that as a sales engineer, I had been feeling comfortable but also professionally stagnant for a while. So the impulse had both intrinsic and external components.

So how’s it been going?

It has been 5 months since I returned to software engineering from sales engineering. I made the right choice, because I am learning again (Ansible! Packer! Golang! deep explorations into Linux, macOS, package management! and of course AI agent stuff). My biggest discovery in that time is not novel: AI agents are amplifying the good and the bad that existed the last time I did this job.

In just 5 months, there are so many specific examples to support this claim. I’ve written and rewritten an in-depth version of this post that recounts these instances, but nothing is coming out in a coherent, persuasive structure. So I am going to use one of the most important lessons I learned in sales engineering: to shut up and not feature dump.

So, if I can get my blogging act together, I will publish some future posts with my fresh eyes experience in this brave new software engineering world.