Might never replace completely, but those remaining will be expected to pump out a lot more code so companies won't need to hire as many.
Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
11–20 of 386 posts
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#12It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as we…
Ruby on Rails generators could build toy projects in like 3 clicks 15 years ago, a Twitter clone being the famous one.
Software engineers still continued to exist somehow.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#13It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as we…
"has already replaced several software engineers. "
I think this is incorrect, unless your friends employed software engineers, or would have employed software engineers.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#14It literally has and will even more in the future. It won't replace *all* software engineers but once the genie is out low effort low risk stuff will be done by an AI. Loveable and such have so many live projects, the alternative was a human building those.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#15The question is, are executives willing to give up all their power and status to an LLM or will “industry” just use AI to invent more bullshit jobs to keep everyone, including the exec relevant.
The reason humans haven’t been replaced in many areas entirely is because humans like being someone’s.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#16I have found that the attention moves to thinking about the things I want done and planning, reading and iterating over the specs and other artefacts that will be part of running the agents. I still need to understand the code and iterate over it to get to a usable and maintainable point. I find the problem is we are reaching the top of the slop curve. I will subside because it's impossible to actually do anything us…
LLMs still do not have proper contextual understanding of their solutions. Just couple days ago I was using GPT 5.5 with xhigh to vide code some application, and yet it defaulted for sorting dates from new to old by using plain string comparison. Just one of the many bugs.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#17It literally has and will even more in the future. It won't replace *all* software engineers but once the genie is out low effort low risk stuff will be done by an AI. Loveable and such have so many live projects, the alternative was a human building those.
> alternative was a human building those
... or them not existing at all?
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#18It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as we…
In your example, those projects were not the domain of engineering. Your friends couldn't afford expertise and those projects never would have been made before. Therefore, these are net-new projects that replace nothing that came before.
This is common in technology, especially software, that improvements in efficiency make software cheaper and expands the total pool of possible software.
And, even if one of the "one button shipping" platforms (and there are many) was hooked into the agent, your friends will hit major problems that they and their AI cannot solve. Whether its tech-debt hell, a major security breach, or something else, any sufficiently complex project will require expertise. Will be a fun day when a European regulator asks a friend about their GDPR compliance and their agent is like "shrug"
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#19I have found that the attention moves to thinking about the things I want done and planning, reading and iterating over the specs and other artefacts that will be part of running the agents. I still need to understand the code and iterate over it to get to a usable and maintainable point. I find the problem is we are reaching the top of the slop curve. I will subside because it's impossible to actually do anything us…
I've never seen a greater disconnect between what I read on social media about vibe coding and what I've seen in real life.
In particular the whole "the best people are the ones who will use it the best". IME the best ones are the ones keeping it the most at arm's length while the people who embrace it the most churn out epic amounts of utter slop.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#20It’s not really about replacing software engineers. But about commodifying it. More software engineers (or roles responsible for code) that work for lower pay might be the trend. Or to maintain a high level of pay you wear many hats, including software.