Fullstack software engineers are well positioned in the AI era (declanbright.com)

A veteran engineer argues that fullstack developers are uniquely well positioned for the era of agentic AI because they combine broad architectural thinking with hands-on implementation skills that let them direct AI coding assistants end-to-end. As AI agents and "swarms" of agents become better at generating code, the real value shifts from deep siloed expertise to the ability to design systems, break problems into AI-directable tasks, write effective prompts/instruction files, and review generated artifacts (database migrations, API endpoints, React components, tests, deployments) for security, performance and maintainability. The author gives a concrete example: a fullstack engineer used an AI agent to deliver a complete feature in three days that would previously have required coordinating a team over two weeks. Technically, this raises new bottlenecks and career imperatives. Human code review becomes the gating factor in regulated and enterprise contexts; specialists who only touch one layer (e.g., frontend devs who ignore bundle size/render-blocking or backend devs who only use ORMs) risk being limited in what they can review or direct. The recommendation: engineers and curricula should emphasize cross-stack system design, prompt engineering, and AI-fluent review practices so teams can scale AI-driven development safely and effectively across both small/medium projects and large, complex codebases.