You seem like someone who hasn’t really worked in software development.

Software engineering does not simply mean coding. A production grade software application goes through analysis, design, implementation (where coding happens), testing (several phases), release and maintenance. Not to mention infrastructure concerns (storage, databases, microservices, service orchestration, middleware, etc). The whole process is too nuanced and complex to conclude that AI would make the whole career obsolete. It might shake up some areas of software engineering but only a small part of it.

You’ll still need people to verify that the AI generated application actually behaves as per the business logic, runs optimally with the hardware you have and scales as your business grows. Which means engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.

You have to understand what software can do, how to design it, and how it should interact with other systems in order to write software and not just code, and AI can’t do that. If you tell it to make you A, and what you really want is B, you’ll never get what you want.

Only about 10-20 percent of my job as a software engineer is writing code. AI can be really amazing at writing code, but unless it can do the other 80-90% of my job without me, I’ll be safe.

Now, whether middle and upper management will know this is an entirely different question. A lot of them think that lines of code written is a good measure of productivity, when in fact it’s often the opposite.

I foresee there being a big struggle for management to come to grips with the fact that AI is better suited at their job than ours.

The plan is to rehire them back temporarily to babysit the AI and fix all the AI generated crap. Then realize it was cheaper to actually just have the devs make code. Then hire them back at a reduced rate on a more permanent basis with the understanding that they believe the code will still be partially generated by AI and cleaned up by the same people and they aren’t paying top tier for third hand AI slop.

Coding is just a part of the overall “programming” problem. Most problematic areas are in translating what the customer wants into code (requirements analysis), modifying code to overcome specific constraints, integration, etc and etc

This thread is full of people comparing OPs hypothetical about 10 years from now with last year’s capability.

Will AI progress that fast? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It probably won’t get that good, but it doesn’t matter. If it gets as good as your average junior that’s going to mean something like 100% increase in productivity, which means 50% as many jobs and that’s going to be a BIG FUCKING DEAL.

Especially when it’s going to be replacing a lot of other types of office workers. What kind of job is your average software dev going to transition to? Tech support? Not anymore. UI Designer? LOL. Manager? And who are you going to be managing?

If the US doesn’t hit 15-20% unemployment in the next 10 years I’ll eat my hat. I’ll be eating it either way because I’ll be starving to death.

I was going to learn how to give a really good handjob but the AI robots will probably take over that too.

Retire. All I ever wanted to be was a programmer. If I can’t do that anymore I’ll just retire. I’m saving/investing every penny I can just in case.

There are a lot of dumb takes here in the comments

Developer displacement works the same way it does for any other technology

The problem is not that the job is eliminated but that fewer are needed per unit of output

My startup only has 4 engineers because we don’t need 5

This trend will continue until the SV hiring bubble bursts

Writing code is last thing you want to do as senior SWE because every line of code is potential debt and maintenence problem.
The just write code bro, figure out things later attitude is good for R&D, MVP and POC that is like 10% of job.

Just like with art, writing code like drawing is just a skill. AI is trying to replace the obvious part (that is actually the reward from thinking and describing problem in your head) because it can’t replace thinking. Removing rewards bring us to depression, depression bring us to death.

Ergo AI will kill economy with no people left to replace it so we will end up to being monkas.
That’s why I’d say SWE will go to farm and wait untill people in cities will start starving to death because AI stopped working and there is nobody left to fix it.

Spend their days (and some nights) tweaking and refining AI prompts to get the stupid thing to generate the software that the dumbass product manager wants and the user does not.

You know…

Pretty much the same thing they do now.

Fixing broken software some robot pushed to prod

Honestly people are getting distracted here. Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive thats a huge boost for smaller companies with only handful of developers.

Many companies are only thinking about reducing costs for themselves but at the same time they’re freeing up a lot of talent for new and old competitors.

Here’s some food for thought:

• Open source developers may use A.I to develop better software to close gap between paid alternatives. (Blender, Gimp, Krita, Linux distributions, mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed)
• Many LLM’s can already be ran freely and locally. These will only get better as technology progresses. This can make selling/profiting from A.I services a lot harder
• A.I may be used to block ads or obfuscate (create bunch of fake data) user data that is sold to advertisers.
• Some media sites are already using A.I to write articles. Whats the point when users may just use chatbot to get all the information without ever engaging with the source.

These are just few that come to mind. but the unkowns with this are quite terrifying.

Finally free from the Golden Handcuffs, I’d use my extra time to do something I’ve always wanted, like music production, which would also inevitably be taken over by AI.

Ai-herder or Robot-farmer or Llama-raiser etc etc

devs still needed to ensure code is sane and not some insane hallucination.

I’m not a programmer, but I don’t think I’d pay for code that was 95% accurate. That sounds buggy af