Introduction

I recently took a stab at a scalable distributed counter implementation. The inspiration comes from an common System Design interview question: “Design a distributed counter that can handle millions of events per second and provide near real-time read access to the current count.”

I read some about it in theory and design interview questions, but I never actually see it in action. Thanks to the advance of AI, a lot of the implementation burden can be handed off to an AI agent, while I focus more on the overall design.

So now I added it to the Golang Dojo project as I thought it could be a fun and education project to deepen my understanding of distributed systems, and also to explore how AI can assist in such process.

Source code is at: https://github.com/hxy9243/go-dojo/tree/main/src/counter

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Will AI Replace Software Engineers?

AI has taken the programming world by storm in 2026.

In just a matter of months, almost all the programmer friends I know have started using AI for their daily tasks. This brought about two conflicting feelings: “Wow, this is incredibly cool,” and “Damn, I’m going to lose my job.” It’s odd to experience so much optimism and pessimism at the exact same moment.

The recent Block layoff was the event that truly shook the community: 40% of the employees at a well-funded, profitable company were laid off, allegedly due to “AI automating their jobs.” Is the age of fully autonomous AI programming really here? What’s the point of human engineers when artificial intelligence is getting smarter by the day?

Does this mean Computer Science no longer matters? Will software engineering as a profession be entirely gone in a few short years?

Probably not.

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