Things are changing at rapid speed, there is nothing "classic" about any of this, and you should at least be able to understand that much if you want to advise people.
Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
71–80 of 386 posts
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#72Sadly I think this post will mislead people, bc the difficult truth (for many) is that software engineering isn't that hard and that's why AI can easily substitute that layer (lower barriers to entry than widely believed).
Wholeheartedly agree, there are some aspects to SWE that could be considered hard, but most of the time it’s rote pattern matching or simple logic resolutions.
People were getting 6-figure salaries with 3 month boot camps before AI, any random college major could eventually become a developer with a few online courses and practicing LeetCode, the party was bound to end eventually.
Even in the case that a college degree was absolutely necessary (it wasn’t) making $150k fresh out of a bachelor’s degree was absurd for every other domain, many of which were much harder than CS.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#73I 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…
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Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#74It 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…
I don't get this reasoning, and yet it is pervasive. Just because non-engineering people come up to you with apps they have created does not mean AI has or will replace software engineers.
Consider:
- I can read about my symptoms from Dr. Google, try a lifestyle change, herbal remedy, or over-the-counter drug, and that may actually work. This does not mean in the slightest that doctor are being made obsolete
- I can create music with generative AI, without needing any understanding of music theory, no taste for music, no creativity. This does not mean people with musical talent are being made obsolete at all.
- I can, with the help of AI, work on DIY projects around the house. This does not in any way mean engineers are being made obsolete.
Who will be helping domain experts to elucidate what they actually need through prototype-refine cycles? Who will be writing and maintaining the operating systems, the languages, the version control systems, th editors and terminal emulators, knowledge/document management systems, the PaaS platforms, etc that these hordes of hobbyist software creators depend on?
Have these people actually properly tested their creations to ensure they are robust? Do they even understand the edge cases that could arise? Is their work secure? Cooking up some quick thing based on some prompt does not equate to engineering whatsoever.
Perhaps you fail to see this because, like many others, you subscribe to the fallacy that the value of software engineering primarily lies in the code produced itself, the arrangements of bits manufactured. It is not; a project is primarily valuable as a theory and abstraction building process. See https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#75> There is great anxiety about AI replacing jobs. It's always the business owner who replaces workers. Let's not anthropomorphize a bunch of graphics cards
If the bunch of graphics cards becomes truly more efficient, business owners who want to hire humans will not be able to compete.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#76“When we did this analysis…”
Nah, kids, this is an opinion column. If you can’t tell the difference, then you don’t get to sit at the adults table. I’ve been an opinion writer for most of my life, and dressing up my perspectives in scientific LARP is bullshit. And yes, I do have underlying suspicions why certain cultures feel entitled to get away with taking such a tone in their declarations. This has been formed over decades of observation and I won’t claim it is scientific…unlike these two fellas who enjoy foods I do not.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#77The 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.
Even AI can do incredible things, like code (our job), It's difficult to me to think that one day, companies will fully assign all software lifecyble job (from designing, implementation, deployement, scaling and maintenance) to autonomous ai agent because, even the better software in the world can have bug and bug can cause from low to fatal real world damage. Those damage , in civil human real world, need a responsible. Unless, govs start voting to give citizenship to ai & autonomous agents and penal responsibility to those agents, human will also be in the loop, always. Because, Human like to designate a responsible and that's right things. So, the adaptative software engineer will always has it place.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#78Sadly I think this post will mislead people, bc the difficult truth (for many) is that software engineering isn't that hard and that's why AI can easily substitute that layer (lower barriers to entry than widely believed).
Wholeheartedly agree, there are some aspects to SWE that could be considered hard, but most of the time it’s rote pattern matching or simple logic resolutions. People were getting 6-figure salaries with 3 month boot camps before AI, any random college major could eventually become a developer with a few online courses and practicing LeetCode, the party was bound to end eventually. Even in the case that a college degr…
Yup! I was a part of the learn to code industry. I am proud of that, bc I know my worker helped a lot of marginalized people gain wealth and power (woo!). My own occupation, stats and econometrics, requires years of higher education to even begin (and decades to master), and yet ~ half of SWE were looking down on me, disrespecting me. To be clear, there were many who were not, but usually they were from some marginalized group: women, autistic, person of color, gay, person from a poor country, etc. I thought, why is my towering knowledge not being respected? Ah, the patriarchy combined with SWE. And then as time went on I just started using my knowledge for myself / those that know and that’s worked out well (bc it’s based on actually knowing math as opposed to relying on the patriarchy).
I think it’s possible the industry eventually figures out that statisticians and econometricians know far more than CS / SWEs (bc AI will tell people), but it could be a decade from now.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#79I think it’s useful to distinguish between LLM and AI. I think this criticism is valid against LLMs, but not against AI. LLMs are a useful tool, but they aren’t AI. Once actual AI is a thing, I think it’s worth revisiting this topic. I’m certain we’ll get there one day, but it will probably be a lot like fusion.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This absolutely fascinates me. I had a friend who needed subtitle files generating for audio and using in CapCut yesterday yet none of the available stuff was suitable, so he asked if I could adapt some of my software to export subtitles. 2 hours later he's got a fully working piece of local software that does exactly what he wants, yet yours is not able to even sort dates correctly. Feel free to download it if you w…
> How can there be such a massive gap in what can be produced?
What I was doing looks really nice and mostly works on the surface, but it is all about the corner cases where these bugs appear. In another day I was able to generate Frida script with LLM help that bypasses Dart certificate pinning/validation and proxies all the traffic by injecting the runtime binaries. With the latest Flutter/Dart version on Android when doing security analysis.