The programmer role did not get replaced. It got decomposed, and the pieces were given new names — some durable job descriptions, some recruiter noise. This branch is a map with a load-bearing claim: around thirty-five AI job titles are in circulation, and behind them sit three or four actual jobs. The titles proliferate because HR req templates proliferate; the work does not (a position argued by Ivan Turkovic, AI Job Titles in 2026, April 2026). Read the responsibilities, never the title.
Six role nodes under people/ai-roles/. The Forward Deployed Engineer is live. Title inflation — the leaf that says most of the other titles are the same three jobs — ships second, because everything on this branch reads more honestly once it exists.
The engineer embedded in the customer's org who ships production code against their data and owns it after go-live. Palantir's mid-2000s role, now standard across the frontier labs. Post-sale, not pre-sale; the discriminator is durable accountability.
The discipline that absorbed prompt engineering. Retrieval design, state management, tool-catalogue design, context-window budgeting, eval harnesses. The job is engineering agent state, not writing clever instructions.
Four distinct jobs sharing one title: assistant/copilot PM, AI platform PM, ML feature PM, and the AI-strategy seat. The spec became the product; acceptance criteria became eval thresholds.
The named owner of convention files, guardrails, and permission policy. The role software/orchestrating-agents says you need and doesn't name. Sits under developer experience, not delivery.
The ceremony-running interpretation of the role is being eliminated. The flow-and-facilitation interpretation is not. Honest about which one most certifications trained for.
Thirty-five titles, three or four jobs. How to read a 2026 AI job description — what the title tells you (little), and what the responsibilities section tells you (everything).
Five positions that hold across the branch. They are what make this a map with a claim, not a careers listicle.
Around thirty-five AI job titles are in circulation. Behind them sit three or four actual jobs. Read the responsibilities, never the title.
The programmer role split; it did not vanish. Every "new" AI role is a piece of the old job that got big enough to need its own name — plus, in the FDE's case, one that predates AI entirely.
The cleanest predictor across every role here. The scrum master who owned ceremonies is gone. The one who owned flow is not.
Salary ranges for these roles come from recruiters and scrapes, conflict badly, and are US-centric. We report the structural signal, not the numbers.
software/orchestrating-agents says the work needs a named owner. This branch is where the owner gets a job description.
The roles branch sits between the software practice (how the work is done) and the business of hiring (who does it). Strongest links to the Software branch's agent-ops leaves and to the HR value chain.