Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

The biggest observable improvement in my post and pre ai development is the ability to tackle two projects at once, if the agent is on track. If not, and I have to do a deep dive to debug, it basically regresses to plain old everything like before.

I really struggle to see why improved capabilities cannot deal with those other layers. I do not believe you have substantiated this claim about not being possible as capabilities improve.

> At one end of the pipeline, development teams need to decide what to build.

Developers are not the ones that do this largely. This role is far more on the side of "Product Owner". Sometimes your job covers both, but this is not the majority of the work and does not mostly require SE knowledge - some input usually.

> This layer is hard to automate because it requires thinking about user needs, market signals, organizational priorities, and in some cases regulatory constraints.

Hmm, these are language models that can talk through much of this already - but more importantly none of what is mentioned there requires software engineering. For parts that do (I'm sure someone would come to correct me if I said that there was none or seemed to suggest it is never ever ever relevant) this is a much smaller slice.

> As AI capabilities improve, the kinds of decisions that can be delegated to AI increase over time. But this does not make the “decide” layer thinner — once a decision can be delegated to AI, it is no longer a source of competitive advantage, and the value of human decision-making migrates upward. Software increases in complexity over time, so there is no ceiling to this process.

Now this is rather hidden but a huge leap in logic. The decide layer does get thinner for all the same projects, and then you simply assert that software will get more complex and so this cancels it all out.

A team of 5 may end up being able to ship what a team of 50 used to, and maybe now there are 10 teams outputting more - but is there not a clear limit to this? At some point do we not just need 45 fewer people? That there needs to be some engineers is not the same as needing anywhere near as many as we have.

For a time I think we will see increased output meaning more software, but that tails off as they get better.

> At the other end of the sandwich, human teams need to be accountable for what they deliver.

Why? And if we assume so, why does that need a software engineer?

> It is possible that some day in the future teams will ship mission-critical code without fully testing and understanding it,

You don't need to read code to test it, and people choose to ship products without fully understanding the code all the time. Literally any decision maker who is not a software engineer who knows the entire codebase does this. Companies fully ship systems that are far too complex for any single developer to even understand.

And much of software isn't mission critical. Or at least, if you want to say it is then the mission is low stakes.

> today’s AI is so unreliable that such haphazard practices would represent an existential threat to software teams and their customers.

I'd argue for a bunch of stuff this isn't true, and the whole point of the article is "never even if they get better" which is different.

> A central insight of AI as Normal Technology is that we can collectively choose to keep humans accountable through shared norms, law, and policy.

Sure, we can ban AI writing code, but will we? Is there a huge collective concern for all us high paid engineers being replaced by AI?

Software developer typically is the one which builds typical CRUD app, front-end, back-end with database and something around that. Their main job is to make the software to apply clear business requirements on software level, while the software itself is not likely revolutionary. Or they are not the responsible ones to make it revolutionary. They provide code in demand.

Then there are engineers that may apply math problems to software and optimise and develop new algorithms, compilers etc. The software itself might be revolutionary and the business.

Now they'll probably get someone on discount, because our salaries are going to tank due to evaporating demand, but I sincerely doubt it'll be zero-d demand.

What I expect is a 3D printer moment - tons and tons of homebrew / shareware style software coming out, an explosion of boutique code.

I also expect a CNC machine moment - vastly reduced demand for hands-on specialists, and more babysitting of automted processes. But it's those machinists who got those jobs.

We could be looking at a long term suppression (~80% reduction?) in demand though until economic growth produces enough demand to employ ~50M software engineers again, if ever. The cliff is unlikely, I'd guess the unregretted loss will be replaced by AI productivity every year, and some portion of growth will, too.

I also guess that all the AI companies can become massively successful without causing much unemployment just by following Claude's model - charge a certain tangible % of a salary for assisting the worker. https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-jobpocolypse.html