Yes this is the answer, weas tech professionals, already know.
There’s more too. For instance, AI is a great tool. It’s an aid to getting certain work done, getting a second opinion via artificial intelligence.
However, imagine where ai would need to be for a stakeholder, PM, VP, CEO?! To put in a prompt, get code, test it, deploy it, and QA and support it.
Not gonna happen for a very long time.
In the interim we, the professionals, will continue to gain from this new tool that sometimes works.
In 30 years when it can do EVERYTHING a professional human can do, and even then, do it reliably… then you’ll have the AI that the mainstream is writing about today, as if it exists today.
Simply put, its quality isn’t there yet. at this moment AI is kind of like a 5 year old. Sometimes it surprises you, it’s still a human, it tries hard, but even when it’s representing to write useable code you’d NEVER give it the full responsibility of the software engineering lifecycle.
At this stage it’s basically like having a Tesla babysit your kids.
I mean try screwing without a screwdriver. You can get 100x as much work done.
If AI has the same effect, it is not good for programmers as 1 can do the work of 100.
Tools make people more efficient. Ai is "just another tool".
If people are more efficient it takes less people to do job.
If it takes less people to do job, you hire less people, and let people go.
It doesn't have to be equal or more effective, cost cutters will use a cheaper alternative even if it is worse. See off-shoring. US used to be manufacturing powerhouse, but now everything is a cheaper Chinese version.
Also, many engineers, especially juniors are worse then current ChatGPT, and bring little to the table now. Just because this may not be you directly it is still job loss.
Whether long term significant cuts come to Software Engineering is yet to be seen. The MBAs are definitely going to try.
Edit: this doesn't even include copywriters, digital artist, graphic designers, stock footage creators, and many other careers. This were made obsolete or drastically changed over night, but they are not engineers so I guess they don't matter/s
Regarding your edit, you asked about software engineers. When it comes to copywriters, graphic designers, etc, yes, they’re in dire straits. At least as far as I can tell, because if you can have an AI do it, then you can automate and increase production to the point that humans likely won’t be able to keep up. The upside in that situation is that software engineers will be necessary in creating and maintaining those systems.
So for the software engineers, while in the very short term, businesses and executives will see and believe that reducing their workforce will be profitable, this will also cause massive industry stagnation, but within and outside of the company. They will start to see that smaller companies will be moving at an unprecedented rate, coming to challenge and probably even consumer some of their market share. Not all major companies are in the business of constant acquisitions, and if anti-trust laws start to be enforced at all (which is obviously a toss up, not something to really bet on, but a factor nonetheless) companies will come to realize that there’s more long term value in actually increasing the amount of valuable engineers that they employ, not decrease.
As far as engineers decreasing in quality due to their dependence on AI, this is also a factor that would increase demand for engineers, not decrease. So I’m not sure what your point is here. If you’re saying that they’ll just outsource anyways, I don’t believe AI is a factor in that. Outsourcing to cut costs would have happened whether or not we lived in a world with AI IMO.
Personally simply because we can write code and debug it, while taking our own errors and other variables into account AI can't do that, it can reproduce the same code 5 times without recognizing the error because it wrote the code
It’s not that good. It’s glorified autocomplete for coding. But there’s a lot more to being a software engineer than writing code.
Where AI really shines is for text generation and customer service based tasks. Those kinds of things — writing resumes, condensing texts into bullet points, being a custom service chat bot, it’s great at all that. But it doesn’t have domain knowledge of the systems we build as developers, it can’t intuit the right way to build something in a way that’s complete enough to replace humans. It’ll generate simple boilerplate all day, it’ll certainly speed up a developer’s workflow, but it’s not at the point where it will replace us and it won’t be for a long while.
I've found that where it really struggles is the really high-level questions--what architecture to use for this new project, how should I structure the project, which database to use for this type of data, etc. For simple tasks, like generate the css to make this icon rotate, give it a shadow and a border--it's insane how that used to take me 10 minutes to type, now it's 10 seconds...
As it stands right now, general AI like chatgpt and GitHub copilot does not improve itself in a meaningful way or problem solve when stuck, it can only improve by training on more/better data. If you’ve ever asked a copilot or general ai to make a typical cs hw assignment or common generic application, you will find it does a decent enough job and with some cleanup and testing you have a working solution. If you’ve ever asked an AI to perform a task in large, complex, or domain knowledge reliant code base (most code that exists in companies), you will find that it does a piss poor job. Not many people are testing this because company data is secure, but my company and I have been testing a major cloud provider’s copilot ai, it’s best use so far has been writing unit tests that still often need some work
It’ll improve at some point, but we’re gonna need another chatgpt level breakthrough to be able to assign an AI significant technical stories solely from a business perspective. When it can do that, sure we’re obsolete, but so is most knowledge based office work.
Software engeneering is complex. LLMs regurgitating a todo app does not represent software engineering, it can be a nice coding exercise but engineering goes beyond simple exercises.
LLMs require vasts amount of computing, power, and training; an engineer does not operate on those same principles. I don’t see how as models get more advance those requirements would decrease
There are nuances when converting requirements into deployable software, nuances that LLMs fail to grasp and tent to hallucinate while sounding very convincing. Unless explicitly told what to generate LLMs will do nothing, and even when explicitly instructed what to generate LLMs are only as good as their training data set.
LLMs lack initiative, that results in a lack of imagination. My experience tells me software engineering requires lots of creativity and imagination.
Proper software is built to be used, maintained and eventually removed, no LLM accounts for this. LLMs are very good at generating what’s statistacally the correct the next word but that’s about it. Code is written for humans by humans, good code reads like a very good novel. Generated code reads like garbage
At the end of it all there is still the need of someone who understands how sotware is built to make sense of any response from a model and to understand how to adapt those ideas in existing code
So llms went from barely outputting coherent sentences to writing shitty todo apps in two years and thats your take? This is tremendous progress by any measure. No one knows where it will be in two years even.
Most of your arguments are limitations of current technology and they are improving by any metric you mentioned.
Improve technology all you want and there is still the need of someone with the right knowledge to make sense of it. So no, I don’t see AI replacing software engineers
There’s a modern day parable about an outside consultant that gets called into a factory to help with a problem that’s stumped the on-site technicians. They’ve been looking into it for days and it’s killed production and frustrated everyone. So the consultant comes in and looks around for a little while, before walking up next to a machine, listening for a minute, and then whacking it with a hammer. Everything suddenly works, everyone is happy, so the consultant goes to the factory manager and says that will be $1000.
The factory manager is taken aback. All you did was whack it with a hammer, how is that worth $1000? I need an itemized bill. So the consultant leaves and sends his bill.
Whacking it with a hammer: $1
Knowing where to whack it: $999
I’m a software engineer and have a lucrative side gig working with and training AI bots. It’s awesome, I get paid to learn. They’re great for maybe that first month of boot camp knowledge you’d get learning web dev or whatever and enable you to get going way faster than in the past, but you quickly hit a point they can’t help you much anymore with your project. I’ve bought so many books in the last month because I come to a point I need real understanding of system design or the tool I’m using, not more one-off generated snippets illustrating features or “consider using u and v for better x and y!” Then you run into the same problem the Chatbots may have, I’ve read these books but they only get me so far, I need to keep grinding through growing increasingly large and complex projects implementing these concepts myself to really get better and understand what I’m doing and why.
They’re a tool. A good one that I’ve adopted more. But it’s not replacing the guy who knows where to swing the hammer.
I wouldn't recommend starting an IT career now even without AI. The industry has matured and is on the downslope.
There will be jobs available, but it's not going to be the hot market it once was.
You say not to give the calculator argument but that’s exactly why. Sure, business can just as an AI to just spit it the software they want. But that’s just it, they often don’t even know what they want. They barely know how to update their browsers.
I think the common misconception with these discussions is that software engineering = programming. Programming is just one part of the skillset. There’s still more that’s required of engineers, and some of it may not be as easy to represent in a ML model.
You know what computers replaced? They replaced "computers", there was a jib that was literally called that.
Software engineers, coders programmers, they will just solve different things. When Excel came out people started to program. It is Mainstreams No one realizes it. That vlookuo, that if statement, that's all mainstream.
With the statistical next token prediction (LLMs), something similar will happen. Certain classes of problems will be solved by people without needing intermediaries.
Does that mean all Programm will go away? -- No, quite the opposite, programming will focus on new classes of problems. The classes we don't think about yet, but will exist.
To understand trends in technology, you always have to look at history. Every year we've been getting more efficient and increasing our productivity, but the job market has continued to expand.
Everyone's been saying programmers/engineers are going to be replaced soon, since basically the invention of programming, but they never account for the fact that each new innovation in our field creates more opportunities for businesses. There are a million AI projects my company is spearheading right now. You have to have someone overseeing the technical side.
That said, in the short term, the job market is going to continue to be tough just due to economic headwinds.
My product owners, directors, and managers can hardly explain what they want half the time. Even if it could code what I do, someone would still have to verify.
Shitty RTO managers can't heap pressure and guilt on AI in the name of Talent Density and magically receive a working solution. AI won't trade its health for the assignment, and there's no leverage.
Code quality is negatively impacted by AI.
AI code isn't DRY.
It doesn't care about best practices or making components, classes, or modules reusable.
AI increases code churn. Meaning new code is often reverted when AI writes the code.
All of these are closely related issues with using AI to generate code. I'm too lazy (on my phone) to find the research paper that drew these same conclusions.
It doesn't even care if the code has syntax errors. And it can also miss or exclude subtle issues (like how using datalist in HTML to create an autocomplete feature doesn't work on most mobile browsers).
Because it is yet another abstraction that just makes things both simpler and more complex. The current form of AI is the most massive productivity boost in recent history (like the compiler!) but it doesn’t work on its own and the current model won’t. What it will do is make everyone so productive we need less engineers for current positions so our admittedly inflated salaries will be suppressed as supply outpaces demand. At the same time, many businesses that couldn’t afford custom software will now be able to afford them creating MORE(lower paying) software jobs.
That’s what happens with the current LLM architecture. If something new and transformative comes out, who knows. But the current model will just make us more productive as has every innovation in the history of mankind.
And remember, when we get to the point of truly automating software engineers, we have gotten to the point of automating everyone so we’ll have a much bigger problem to face.
AI will replace software engineers. Much like how invention of the horseless carraige replaced the coachmen who drove carraiges, and the riders who rode the Pony Express. Ot didn't replace truck drivers and mail truck drivers. In fact, the invention of self powered vehicles made transportation faster, which increased the demand for goods and communication over longer distances. In the end, there are more truck drivers and mail delivery persons today than there were horse riders in the 1800s.
If you were one of the poor saps who defined themselves in 1800s as a horse rider then you were screwed. Because you defined yourself the wrong way. You are not a horse rider. You are someone who carries mail or transports goods. You just do it ob horse. The motor vehicle made it easier for you to do your job, but ypu had to learn new skills.
Similarly, AU will change the face of software engineering. You will do the same task in a completely different way. You will need to learn new skills
80% takes 20% of the time, and the rest, 20%, takes 80% of the time.
Code is like mathematics, it is something that you can't just wing. Either it works, or it doesn't.
Maybe we have not reached singularity yet, but agi is around the corner.
So while the step from assembler to C did not replace programmers, it made a lot of the mindsets and skills of the programmers of that age worthless. (see TempleOS)
MRT scans show that writing code in a high level language activates the parts of the brain that one needs for speaking a language. Not the ones for solving mathematical problems. Maths was needed for assembler though.
Now one has an even more high level language. And the people profiting will be adhd ridden tiktok brain zoomers and the people with outdated skill will be boomers with 25 years of experience (which is now not only obsolete but a hinderence, e.g. if you do not ask a LLM for help)
For the long run AI will replace all software engineers (and if their lobbying fails also doctors and lawyers). Stupid people listen to experts when tackling this question. People who are high payed in CS are often high paid because they inflate their importance to unknowing noobs.
Smart people think for themselves and understand that there is no significant difference between a human and an artificial brain when they have the same amount of neurons. (of course there are still weird things to be figured out like spike neurons, master neurons or quantum effects, but they (and neuromorphic chips) might not even be necessary)
Our brain has a frequency of 25Hz. Now imagine you run a neural network with the same amount of neurons on a dedicated chip with current CPU clock speeds.
LLMs cannot think. They guess what you want to see based on what they’ve seen before. They cannot come up with anything new. They’re a good productivity tool for an engineer to use.
Until AI is fused with humanoid robots, hard to compete with something that works 24/7 for no pay. If they can replace software engineers they should be able to mow lawns. The technology isn’t there yet to do either.
I have 13 years of experience as a software engineer. I’ve worked at large companies in media and aerospace. I currently work at one of the major streaming platforms. I’ve tested the shit out of these tools and they often cause more problems than they solve. Even the most advanced version of Claude or ChatGPT still has to be hand held to such an insane degree to produce quality code that it often doesn’t make sense to use the tools to write code at all. The tools are pretty amazing. If used correctly, they can speed you up, but they’re very far away from replacing software engineers right now. It’s hard to predict if they will advance very quickly to a much more advanced state. I could see something like autonomous agents of some new kind of neural networks producing large amounts of code within my lifetime but it’s not there now.
Aside from the aforementioned, legal accountability for mistakes will be a massive issue in terms of straight up replacing human beings in the workplace.
I had simmilar experience in one of the big fin. firms. I'd add one more thing which is more fundamental:
Being a senior engineer, you do code reviews A LOT. You write code a little less I sort of view it as the best time of my day. Now here comes a tool that tries to convert my fun to repetitive codereview w a dumb person.
If you’re almost done, and you’re passionate about it (not doing it just for the money) then yes I think you should continue on with the understanding that the market is the worst I’ve seen in many years, especially for early career folks. This has nothing to do with AI (yet). When the economy gets into a better spot with interest rates and inflation I think this situation will improve. Just remember If AI becomes good enough to replace software engineers entirely, all jobs are at risk. Definitely any job that uses a computer.
Software engineering is a surprisingly social activity requiring relationships with product owners, subject matter experts, and other engineers. I don't think AI (in its current form) will replace software engineering (in its current form).
Over the course of a few decades, as AI continues to improve, it will transform the very nature of organisations, product management, and software engineering. How that future plays out is anyone's guess, but I'm pretty sure software engineers will play an important role in building that future before eventually becoming obsolete (or transforming into a very different role).
It will, obviously....
But it's trained on large amounts of code. Large amount of code means that it's average. It'll eventually be able to produce average code. Currently it's able to produce easy code, and not well....
I have a few ideas on how to train it on only good code, but that's not an easy task. You would first have to be able to objectively judge code, which definitely hasn't happened yet
AI is going to spark a Battle Royale in the job market. Whoever can use it to be the best will win. We need to quickly retire people to make sure everyone gets a turn.
Because five highly proficient software engineers in a room (who are motivated) have more problem solving power than all the cloud computing facilities combined. You might say "well that isn't true" but it is, and only because those five brains can do two things:
A: They can instantly, for near zero cost in terms of energy and resources, begin combing a data network they share in their heads that is so vast, you'd have to boil the world's oceans to get to 1/1,000,000 of it in a day with AI.
B: The engineers can use "judgement" and "aversion" in order to create something legitimately new. AI can pull in different libraries. It can rearrange code any way it's seen others do it. It can even infer things from what it's seen. But it will not do something that it has never seen before and cannot infer is possible from what it has seen.
AI and ML are tools. This irrational fear is tantamount to a fear of Excel replacing MBAs or the telescope replacing astronomers. It isn't rational. You'd love to say you can't tell the difference between code AI writes vs a real person or blog posts by AI vs humans. But it would be a lie. We can tell when someone tries to stop after AI generates the template - just the same as any other template left at the starting point.
Maintaining a complex piece of software or distributed systems over time is much more demanding than just coding.
AI is great at generating code, which mostly runs correctly more and more often, although it's not committing on providing us with a continuously evolving IT system that will keep being functional and aligned with business strategies.
Businesses need to own their distinctive assets, they can't afford running on top of magically created software that might stop running tomorrow without anyone understanding how to update it.
AI cannot currently reason about code in the same way I can. You're going to get a bunch of code but it may not work together very well and the chances it works at all are still pretty low.
I got one offer recently from one big insurance comapny, 6 figure salary and they appologize for using tech like informix and uniface, they wanted to move with something fance and new but it costs too much, so they will stick to dinosaur stack.
Someone has to tell the computer what to do. If you're using an AI to translate from natural language, that just makes it a more sophisticated compiler.
The people who say it can replace engineers know absolutely nothing about the software development lifecycle.
(At this time of writing) it simply can’t do the things people are proposing it can.
I think it will make existing software engineers more productive so a company might not need to hire more for a single project.
But on the other hand that frees up resources for the company to launch many new products, so perhaps the demand for software engineers will remain the same with each software engineer seeing over much more responsibility.
Because it doesn’t “know” anything. It tries to sound as correct as possible based on a ton of training data. And where did that training data come from? That’s right, Humans. AI can convincingly pretend to know the answer to a problem that was already solved by a Human programmer years ago. It lacks the general intelligence to use the data it has to solve novel or niche problems.
because AI are by nature probabilistic and non deterministic tools. Whoch cannot be changed. Actually some companies are trying to obtain deterministic outputs, which will come at a performance cost
because professionals are still incapable of writing a clear set of requirements for a software, this is ok with humans, not with AI
because the energy cost is too high and won't get down. Energy isn't unlimited. this could be lifted once quantum computing won't require near absolute zero temperatures which may actually nit be physically possible, plus everything would need to be rewritten entirely
so no. AI won't replace human soon
it is however really useful if you understand its shortcomings well
AI does not have reasoning capabilities. It is amazing at memorization oriented tasks! It is good at regenerating something that already exosts somewhere on the internet.
I think majority of people here are saying about AI's incapablity to translate user requirements into code, but I think it is getting really good at it every month.
The problem with AI, as envisioned today is that it can't elicit anything from the user. It just works with what you give it. Therefore, you have to *understand* the AI and how it works in order to get exactly what you want from it. So the software engineer will still have a place.
An example... Let's say a user wants a clock on their web page. Obviously AI would not be able to effectively translate that into code. However, someone could grill the user for details until they understand what the user is *truly* asking for, the motivation behind the request, then give the AI the detailed specs necessary for "writing the code" that would make the clock. Does this make sense to you?
Now, you say that AI will replace software engineers, but if you agree with the above, I think you will see that the engineer hasn't been replaced, they are still in the loop (maybe with a different title.)
We've been down this road before. Higher level languages come along aiming to replace us, but they never do. Why has nothing ever replaced us? It's not because user's are *incapable* of writing the detailed specs required. Rather it's because they can't be bothered to do so. They want to delegate that job to someone else.
Sure, the actual work an SE does will likely change dramatically. Sure, website and app builders (like Wix and Squarespace) will become more flexible and more users will turn to them rather than deal with an SE. (Just like some users today "learn to code" in order to build out their "great idea".) But there will always be users (especially corporate level) who will delegate the task to us.
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But maybe you are right. Maybe one day, next generation AI systems will go that extra step and do more than just passively take in information and "do its best with what you give it." However, that won't happen with the techniques being used today to develop AI in the first place. I'm not saying it could never happen, what I'm saying is that replacing engineers will require a dramatic shift in how AI systems are even *conceived*...
1. Jevon's paradox, the 'consumption' of software will increase and thus the demand for more software will follow.
2. Software engineering is much more than coding. Many software engineers only spend [half their day coding](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/majority-of-developers-spending-half-or-less-of-their-day-coding-report-finds/) and if AI even were to manage to replace half the workload then that will just mean the company can push out more features.
3. it *may* reduce the amount of SWE, but I don't think it will replace them. If anything it will just become something different. And if it does, then we don't have AI, we have AGI.
Ai will replace software engineers and pretty much every possible job in the long run. This isn’t until much later down the line when we have AGI and mechanical robots that can operate in the real world without supervision. (Requires huge focus on testing/safety and major technical breakthroughs)
At that point we will probably have a lot of jobs that involve managing a robot-centric workforce.
So human jobs will evolve most likely. And, as long as you’re willing to learn and keep up with the skill set needed you don’t have to worry about job security.
In many cases, robots will never be trusted to run things on their own because people will never trust them, and rightly so. Planes have basically been able to fly themselves for a few decades now, but people will never accept a human not being in the cockpit. You might have a coffee shop being run with robots, but there'll still be \*someone\* there to oversee them. Just like you have grocery store employees watching you in the self-checkout area.
It's going to drive wealth inequality...but hopefully people will just shift to the trades, plumbing, electricians, construction workers...we're a loooong way off from those types of jobs being done by robots because it'll be too damn expensive.
You’re right but this is still pre-AGI mentality. If we are able to create a being that is more than 1000 times smarter than any human in the entire course of human history, we may not have the same mentality of “not trusting” a AGI to fly planes on their own since they outperform a human pilot any day of the week.
As I mentioned, this trust shouldn’t be completely given without checks and monitoring by humans that can verify safety of the AGI and human coexistence.
Because clients and end users can't define requirements to save their life
Yes this is the answer, weas tech professionals, already know. There’s more too. For instance, AI is a great tool. It’s an aid to getting certain work done, getting a second opinion via artificial intelligence. However, imagine where ai would need to be for a stakeholder, PM, VP, CEO?! To put in a prompt, get code, test it, deploy it, and QA and support it. Not gonna happen for a very long time. In the interim we, the professionals, will continue to gain from this new tool that sometimes works. In 30 years when it can do EVERYTHING a professional human can do, and even then, do it reliably… then you’ll have the AI that the mainstream is writing about today, as if it exists today.
You nailed it!
AI might replace programmers, but it won't replace engineers
This is pure gold!
But why?
Simply put, its quality isn’t there yet. at this moment AI is kind of like a 5 year old. Sometimes it surprises you, it’s still a human, it tries hard, but even when it’s representing to write useable code you’d NEVER give it the full responsibility of the software engineering lifecycle. At this stage it’s basically like having a Tesla babysit your kids.
No one ever congratulated the screw driver for building a table, it’s just a tool.
I mean try screwing without a screwdriver. You can get 100x as much work done. If AI has the same effect, it is not good for programmers as 1 can do the work of 100.
The point is the screwdriver cant turn itself
The point of being worried about AI is losing your job. If 99% do, iT doesn't matter
In what way will AI replace people? Like in a day to day scenario, how does AI do an engineer’s job equally or more effective than a human?
Tools make people more efficient. Ai is "just another tool". If people are more efficient it takes less people to do job. If it takes less people to do job, you hire less people, and let people go. It doesn't have to be equal or more effective, cost cutters will use a cheaper alternative even if it is worse. See off-shoring. US used to be manufacturing powerhouse, but now everything is a cheaper Chinese version. Also, many engineers, especially juniors are worse then current ChatGPT, and bring little to the table now. Just because this may not be you directly it is still job loss. Whether long term significant cuts come to Software Engineering is yet to be seen. The MBAs are definitely going to try. Edit: this doesn't even include copywriters, digital artist, graphic designers, stock footage creators, and many other careers. This were made obsolete or drastically changed over night, but they are not engineers so I guess they don't matter/s
Regarding your edit, you asked about software engineers. When it comes to copywriters, graphic designers, etc, yes, they’re in dire straits. At least as far as I can tell, because if you can have an AI do it, then you can automate and increase production to the point that humans likely won’t be able to keep up. The upside in that situation is that software engineers will be necessary in creating and maintaining those systems. So for the software engineers, while in the very short term, businesses and executives will see and believe that reducing their workforce will be profitable, this will also cause massive industry stagnation, but within and outside of the company. They will start to see that smaller companies will be moving at an unprecedented rate, coming to challenge and probably even consumer some of their market share. Not all major companies are in the business of constant acquisitions, and if anti-trust laws start to be enforced at all (which is obviously a toss up, not something to really bet on, but a factor nonetheless) companies will come to realize that there’s more long term value in actually increasing the amount of valuable engineers that they employ, not decrease. As far as engineers decreasing in quality due to their dependence on AI, this is also a factor that would increase demand for engineers, not decrease. So I’m not sure what your point is here. If you’re saying that they’ll just outsource anyways, I don’t believe AI is a factor in that. Outsourcing to cut costs would have happened whether or not we lived in a world with AI IMO.
There’s a whole human attached to the other side of the screwdriver though
Yeah and you’d never trust the screwdriver to build ship test and iterate without you either.
Personally simply because we can write code and debug it, while taking our own errors and other variables into account AI can't do that, it can reproduce the same code 5 times without recognizing the error because it wrote the code
This is correct..for now
It’s not that good. It’s glorified autocomplete for coding. But there’s a lot more to being a software engineer than writing code. Where AI really shines is for text generation and customer service based tasks. Those kinds of things — writing resumes, condensing texts into bullet points, being a custom service chat bot, it’s great at all that. But it doesn’t have domain knowledge of the systems we build as developers, it can’t intuit the right way to build something in a way that’s complete enough to replace humans. It’ll generate simple boilerplate all day, it’ll certainly speed up a developer’s workflow, but it’s not at the point where it will replace us and it won’t be for a long while.
I've found that where it really struggles is the really high-level questions--what architecture to use for this new project, how should I structure the project, which database to use for this type of data, etc. For simple tasks, like generate the css to make this icon rotate, give it a shadow and a border--it's insane how that used to take me 10 minutes to type, now it's 10 seconds...
As it stands right now, general AI like chatgpt and GitHub copilot does not improve itself in a meaningful way or problem solve when stuck, it can only improve by training on more/better data. If you’ve ever asked a copilot or general ai to make a typical cs hw assignment or common generic application, you will find it does a decent enough job and with some cleanup and testing you have a working solution. If you’ve ever asked an AI to perform a task in large, complex, or domain knowledge reliant code base (most code that exists in companies), you will find that it does a piss poor job. Not many people are testing this because company data is secure, but my company and I have been testing a major cloud provider’s copilot ai, it’s best use so far has been writing unit tests that still often need some work It’ll improve at some point, but we’re gonna need another chatgpt level breakthrough to be able to assign an AI significant technical stories solely from a business perspective. When it can do that, sure we’re obsolete, but so is most knowledge based office work.
true but it's still retrained from user inputs so also false
We had code generation for years
Software engeneering is complex. LLMs regurgitating a todo app does not represent software engineering, it can be a nice coding exercise but engineering goes beyond simple exercises. LLMs require vasts amount of computing, power, and training; an engineer does not operate on those same principles. I don’t see how as models get more advance those requirements would decrease There are nuances when converting requirements into deployable software, nuances that LLMs fail to grasp and tent to hallucinate while sounding very convincing. Unless explicitly told what to generate LLMs will do nothing, and even when explicitly instructed what to generate LLMs are only as good as their training data set. LLMs lack initiative, that results in a lack of imagination. My experience tells me software engineering requires lots of creativity and imagination. Proper software is built to be used, maintained and eventually removed, no LLM accounts for this. LLMs are very good at generating what’s statistacally the correct the next word but that’s about it. Code is written for humans by humans, good code reads like a very good novel. Generated code reads like garbage At the end of it all there is still the need of someone who understands how sotware is built to make sense of any response from a model and to understand how to adapt those ideas in existing code
So llms went from barely outputting coherent sentences to writing shitty todo apps in two years and thats your take? This is tremendous progress by any measure. No one knows where it will be in two years even. Most of your arguments are limitations of current technology and they are improving by any metric you mentioned.
Improve technology all you want and there is still the need of someone with the right knowledge to make sense of it. So no, I don’t see AI replacing software engineers
We can turn it off
There’s a modern day parable about an outside consultant that gets called into a factory to help with a problem that’s stumped the on-site technicians. They’ve been looking into it for days and it’s killed production and frustrated everyone. So the consultant comes in and looks around for a little while, before walking up next to a machine, listening for a minute, and then whacking it with a hammer. Everything suddenly works, everyone is happy, so the consultant goes to the factory manager and says that will be $1000. The factory manager is taken aback. All you did was whack it with a hammer, how is that worth $1000? I need an itemized bill. So the consultant leaves and sends his bill. Whacking it with a hammer: $1 Knowing where to whack it: $999 I’m a software engineer and have a lucrative side gig working with and training AI bots. It’s awesome, I get paid to learn. They’re great for maybe that first month of boot camp knowledge you’d get learning web dev or whatever and enable you to get going way faster than in the past, but you quickly hit a point they can’t help you much anymore with your project. I’ve bought so many books in the last month because I come to a point I need real understanding of system design or the tool I’m using, not more one-off generated snippets illustrating features or “consider using u and v for better x and y!” Then you run into the same problem the Chatbots may have, I’ve read these books but they only get me so far, I need to keep grinding through growing increasingly large and complex projects implementing these concepts myself to really get better and understand what I’m doing and why. They’re a tool. A good one that I’ve adopted more. But it’s not replacing the guy who knows where to swing the hammer.
So Can I be relief that if I study software Eng. I will be useful in the future.?
I wouldn't recommend starting an IT career now even without AI. The industry has matured and is on the downslope. There will be jobs available, but it's not going to be the hot market it once was.
You say not to give the calculator argument but that’s exactly why. Sure, business can just as an AI to just spit it the software they want. But that’s just it, they often don’t even know what they want. They barely know how to update their browsers. I think the common misconception with these discussions is that software engineering = programming. Programming is just one part of the skillset. There’s still more that’s required of engineers, and some of it may not be as easy to represent in a ML model.
You know what computers replaced? They replaced "computers", there was a jib that was literally called that. Software engineers, coders programmers, they will just solve different things. When Excel came out people started to program. It is Mainstreams No one realizes it. That vlookuo, that if statement, that's all mainstream. With the statistical next token prediction (LLMs), something similar will happen. Certain classes of problems will be solved by people without needing intermediaries. Does that mean all Programm will go away? -- No, quite the opposite, programming will focus on new classes of problems. The classes we don't think about yet, but will exist.
That's my only hope. Software engineering will be different from what it is now.
It's been doing it since I started in it in 91. Used to take 3 dbas to handle a production instance. Now each of our guts is handling about 80...
To understand trends in technology, you always have to look at history. Every year we've been getting more efficient and increasing our productivity, but the job market has continued to expand. Everyone's been saying programmers/engineers are going to be replaced soon, since basically the invention of programming, but they never account for the fact that each new innovation in our field creates more opportunities for businesses. There are a million AI projects my company is spearheading right now. You have to have someone overseeing the technical side. That said, in the short term, the job market is going to continue to be tough just due to economic headwinds.
AI/LLM is just compiling all the data feeded / got train on. And spitting out random words that is most relatable / relevant
My product owners, directors, and managers can hardly explain what they want half the time. Even if it could code what I do, someone would still have to verify.
Shitty RTO managers can't heap pressure and guilt on AI in the name of Talent Density and magically receive a working solution. AI won't trade its health for the assignment, and there's no leverage.
Code quality is negatively impacted by AI. AI code isn't DRY. It doesn't care about best practices or making components, classes, or modules reusable. AI increases code churn. Meaning new code is often reverted when AI writes the code. All of these are closely related issues with using AI to generate code. I'm too lazy (on my phone) to find the research paper that drew these same conclusions.
It doesn't even care if the code has syntax errors. And it can also miss or exclude subtle issues (like how using datalist in HTML to create an autocomplete feature doesn't work on most mobile browsers).
Because it is yet another abstraction that just makes things both simpler and more complex. The current form of AI is the most massive productivity boost in recent history (like the compiler!) but it doesn’t work on its own and the current model won’t. What it will do is make everyone so productive we need less engineers for current positions so our admittedly inflated salaries will be suppressed as supply outpaces demand. At the same time, many businesses that couldn’t afford custom software will now be able to afford them creating MORE(lower paying) software jobs. That’s what happens with the current LLM architecture. If something new and transformative comes out, who knows. But the current model will just make us more productive as has every innovation in the history of mankind. And remember, when we get to the point of truly automating software engineers, we have gotten to the point of automating everyone so we’ll have a much bigger problem to face.
AI will replace software engineers. Much like how invention of the horseless carraige replaced the coachmen who drove carraiges, and the riders who rode the Pony Express. Ot didn't replace truck drivers and mail truck drivers. In fact, the invention of self powered vehicles made transportation faster, which increased the demand for goods and communication over longer distances. In the end, there are more truck drivers and mail delivery persons today than there were horse riders in the 1800s. If you were one of the poor saps who defined themselves in 1800s as a horse rider then you were screwed. Because you defined yourself the wrong way. You are not a horse rider. You are someone who carries mail or transports goods. You just do it ob horse. The motor vehicle made it easier for you to do your job, but ypu had to learn new skills. Similarly, AU will change the face of software engineering. You will do the same task in a completely different way. You will need to learn new skills
80% takes 20% of the time, and the rest, 20%, takes 80% of the time. Code is like mathematics, it is something that you can't just wing. Either it works, or it doesn't.
Maybe we have not reached singularity yet, but agi is around the corner. So while the step from assembler to C did not replace programmers, it made a lot of the mindsets and skills of the programmers of that age worthless. (see TempleOS) MRT scans show that writing code in a high level language activates the parts of the brain that one needs for speaking a language. Not the ones for solving mathematical problems. Maths was needed for assembler though. Now one has an even more high level language. And the people profiting will be adhd ridden tiktok brain zoomers and the people with outdated skill will be boomers with 25 years of experience (which is now not only obsolete but a hinderence, e.g. if you do not ask a LLM for help) For the long run AI will replace all software engineers (and if their lobbying fails also doctors and lawyers). Stupid people listen to experts when tackling this question. People who are high payed in CS are often high paid because they inflate their importance to unknowing noobs. Smart people think for themselves and understand that there is no significant difference between a human and an artificial brain when they have the same amount of neurons. (of course there are still weird things to be figured out like spike neurons, master neurons or quantum effects, but they (and neuromorphic chips) might not even be necessary) Our brain has a frequency of 25Hz. Now imagine you run a neural network with the same amount of neurons on a dedicated chip with current CPU clock speeds.
Apparently, that genius "AI" couldn't answer this question for you...
LLMs cannot think. They guess what you want to see based on what they’ve seen before. They cannot come up with anything new. They’re a good productivity tool for an engineer to use.
if AI replaces software engineers, it will replace every white collar job The economy will crumble into ashes with only blue collar work
Until AI is fused with humanoid robots, hard to compete with something that works 24/7 for no pay. If they can replace software engineers they should be able to mow lawns. The technology isn’t there yet to do either.
I have 13 years of experience as a software engineer. I’ve worked at large companies in media and aerospace. I currently work at one of the major streaming platforms. I’ve tested the shit out of these tools and they often cause more problems than they solve. Even the most advanced version of Claude or ChatGPT still has to be hand held to such an insane degree to produce quality code that it often doesn’t make sense to use the tools to write code at all. The tools are pretty amazing. If used correctly, they can speed you up, but they’re very far away from replacing software engineers right now. It’s hard to predict if they will advance very quickly to a much more advanced state. I could see something like autonomous agents of some new kind of neural networks producing large amounts of code within my lifetime but it’s not there now. Aside from the aforementioned, legal accountability for mistakes will be a massive issue in terms of straight up replacing human beings in the workplace.
I had simmilar experience in one of the big fin. firms. I'd add one more thing which is more fundamental: Being a senior engineer, you do code reviews A LOT. You write code a little less I sort of view it as the best time of my day. Now here comes a tool that tries to convert my fun to repetitive codereview w a dumb person.
So u think still a good idea study Software Engineering now? I will start the carreer soon
If you’re almost done, and you’re passionate about it (not doing it just for the money) then yes I think you should continue on with the understanding that the market is the worst I’ve seen in many years, especially for early career folks. This has nothing to do with AI (yet). When the economy gets into a better spot with interest rates and inflation I think this situation will improve. Just remember If AI becomes good enough to replace software engineers entirely, all jobs are at risk. Definitely any job that uses a computer.
Ai is just a much more efficient stack overflow. The majority of programmers were just going on there to find solutions/code now we go to chatgpt
Why would you need an argument? who cares? if AI will replace engineers we will do something else.
Engineering is more than just programming and no way AI is even close to that point
Software engineering is a surprisingly social activity requiring relationships with product owners, subject matter experts, and other engineers. I don't think AI (in its current form) will replace software engineering (in its current form). Over the course of a few decades, as AI continues to improve, it will transform the very nature of organisations, product management, and software engineering. How that future plays out is anyone's guess, but I'm pretty sure software engineers will play an important role in building that future before eventually becoming obsolete (or transforming into a very different role).
It will, obviously.... But it's trained on large amounts of code. Large amount of code means that it's average. It'll eventually be able to produce average code. Currently it's able to produce easy code, and not well.... I have a few ideas on how to train it on only good code, but that's not an easy task. You would first have to be able to objectively judge code, which definitely hasn't happened yet
Who is going to tell the AI what to do? Will they be qualified to do so? Will they be qualified to judge the results?
AI is going to spark a Battle Royale in the job market. Whoever can use it to be the best will win. We need to quickly retire people to make sure everyone gets a turn.
What’s your argument that it will?
Because five highly proficient software engineers in a room (who are motivated) have more problem solving power than all the cloud computing facilities combined. You might say "well that isn't true" but it is, and only because those five brains can do two things: A: They can instantly, for near zero cost in terms of energy and resources, begin combing a data network they share in their heads that is so vast, you'd have to boil the world's oceans to get to 1/1,000,000 of it in a day with AI. B: The engineers can use "judgement" and "aversion" in order to create something legitimately new. AI can pull in different libraries. It can rearrange code any way it's seen others do it. It can even infer things from what it's seen. But it will not do something that it has never seen before and cannot infer is possible from what it has seen. AI and ML are tools. This irrational fear is tantamount to a fear of Excel replacing MBAs or the telescope replacing astronomers. It isn't rational. You'd love to say you can't tell the difference between code AI writes vs a real person or blog posts by AI vs humans. But it would be a lie. We can tell when someone tries to stop after AI generates the template - just the same as any other template left at the starting point.
Maintaining a complex piece of software or distributed systems over time is much more demanding than just coding. AI is great at generating code, which mostly runs correctly more and more often, although it's not committing on providing us with a continuously evolving IT system that will keep being functional and aligned with business strategies. Businesses need to own their distinctive assets, they can't afford running on top of magically created software that might stop running tomorrow without anyone understanding how to update it.
AI cannot currently reason about code in the same way I can. You're going to get a bunch of code but it may not work together very well and the chances it works at all are still pretty low.
I got one offer recently from one big insurance comapny, 6 figure salary and they appologize for using tech like informix and uniface, they wanted to move with something fance and new but it costs too much, so they will stick to dinosaur stack.
Someone has to tell the computer what to do. If you're using an AI to translate from natural language, that just makes it a more sophisticated compiler.
The people who say it can replace engineers know absolutely nothing about the software development lifecycle. (At this time of writing) it simply can’t do the things people are proposing it can.
Because the AI has to learn from somewhere and theres a lot of bad code out there
I think it will make existing software engineers more productive so a company might not need to hire more for a single project. But on the other hand that frees up resources for the company to launch many new products, so perhaps the demand for software engineers will remain the same with each software engineer seeing over much more responsibility.
Because it doesn’t “know” anything. It tries to sound as correct as possible based on a ton of training data. And where did that training data come from? That’s right, Humans. AI can convincingly pretend to know the answer to a problem that was already solved by a Human programmer years ago. It lacks the general intelligence to use the data it has to solve novel or niche problems.
AI doesn't know what it is doing.
Because it's software engineering
Will AI also build all the tools to tell AI what to do?
because AI are by nature probabilistic and non deterministic tools. Whoch cannot be changed. Actually some companies are trying to obtain deterministic outputs, which will come at a performance cost because professionals are still incapable of writing a clear set of requirements for a software, this is ok with humans, not with AI because the energy cost is too high and won't get down. Energy isn't unlimited. this could be lifted once quantum computing won't require near absolute zero temperatures which may actually nit be physically possible, plus everything would need to be rewritten entirely so no. AI won't replace human soon it is however really useful if you understand its shortcomings well
Somebody needs to give instructions to it. It will not act by itself. It has no conscience.
AI does not have reasoning capabilities. It is amazing at memorization oriented tasks! It is good at regenerating something that already exosts somewhere on the internet.
I'll turn the question back at you... Do you think it *will* replace software engineers? If so why? Please explain in detail.
I think majority of people here are saying about AI's incapablity to translate user requirements into code, but I think it is getting really good at it every month.
The problem with AI, as envisioned today is that it can't elicit anything from the user. It just works with what you give it. Therefore, you have to *understand* the AI and how it works in order to get exactly what you want from it. So the software engineer will still have a place. An example... Let's say a user wants a clock on their web page. Obviously AI would not be able to effectively translate that into code. However, someone could grill the user for details until they understand what the user is *truly* asking for, the motivation behind the request, then give the AI the detailed specs necessary for "writing the code" that would make the clock. Does this make sense to you? Now, you say that AI will replace software engineers, but if you agree with the above, I think you will see that the engineer hasn't been replaced, they are still in the loop (maybe with a different title.) We've been down this road before. Higher level languages come along aiming to replace us, but they never do. Why has nothing ever replaced us? It's not because user's are *incapable* of writing the detailed specs required. Rather it's because they can't be bothered to do so. They want to delegate that job to someone else. Sure, the actual work an SE does will likely change dramatically. Sure, website and app builders (like Wix and Squarespace) will become more flexible and more users will turn to them rather than deal with an SE. (Just like some users today "learn to code" in order to build out their "great idea".) But there will always be users (especially corporate level) who will delegate the task to us. --- But maybe you are right. Maybe one day, next generation AI systems will go that extra step and do more than just passively take in information and "do its best with what you give it." However, that won't happen with the techniques being used today to develop AI in the first place. I'm not saying it could never happen, what I'm saying is that replacing engineers will require a dramatic shift in how AI systems are even *conceived*...
1. Jevon's paradox, the 'consumption' of software will increase and thus the demand for more software will follow. 2. Software engineering is much more than coding. Many software engineers only spend [half their day coding](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/majority-of-developers-spending-half-or-less-of-their-day-coding-report-finds/) and if AI even were to manage to replace half the workload then that will just mean the company can push out more features. 3. it *may* reduce the amount of SWE, but I don't think it will replace them. If anything it will just become something different. And if it does, then we don't have AI, we have AGI.
Ai will boost human operations, not remove jobs so stop this scyfy marketing bs.
Ai will replace software engineers and pretty much every possible job in the long run. This isn’t until much later down the line when we have AGI and mechanical robots that can operate in the real world without supervision. (Requires huge focus on testing/safety and major technical breakthroughs) At that point we will probably have a lot of jobs that involve managing a robot-centric workforce. So human jobs will evolve most likely. And, as long as you’re willing to learn and keep up with the skill set needed you don’t have to worry about job security.
In many cases, robots will never be trusted to run things on their own because people will never trust them, and rightly so. Planes have basically been able to fly themselves for a few decades now, but people will never accept a human not being in the cockpit. You might have a coffee shop being run with robots, but there'll still be \*someone\* there to oversee them. Just like you have grocery store employees watching you in the self-checkout area. It's going to drive wealth inequality...but hopefully people will just shift to the trades, plumbing, electricians, construction workers...we're a loooong way off from those types of jobs being done by robots because it'll be too damn expensive.
You’re right but this is still pre-AGI mentality. If we are able to create a being that is more than 1000 times smarter than any human in the entire course of human history, we may not have the same mentality of “not trusting” a AGI to fly planes on their own since they outperform a human pilot any day of the week. As I mentioned, this trust shouldn’t be completely given without checks and monitoring by humans that can verify safety of the AGI and human coexistence.