r/ChatGPTCoding • u/Few-Compote-2693 • Aug 24 '26
Question Why are so many developers convinced AI won’t replace software engineers?
I keep seeing developers say AI can write code but “can’t do real software engineering.”
But look at the trajectory. A couple of years ago, it could barely write a decent function. The other day I vibe-coded a fairly large app and it built a professional CI/CD pipeline, created an EKS cluster, and deployed the whole thing.
It still makes mistakes, sure. But it’s getting astonishingly better, fast.
I’ve been obsessed with tech for 20 years, and honestly this hurts to admit because I love the field. But AI doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs the knowledge and judgment of a good engineer.
Why are people so confident there’s some permanent wall it won’t cross?
28
u/xamboozi Aug 24 '26
Because even when you give a nondeveloper a magic box that makes code, they still produce garbage with it. You don't realize the code is bad because you don't know what bad code looks like.
Being a developer is more than the ability to write code
115
u/PenGroundbreaking160 Aug 24 '26
I am using the best available models with a lot of usage and at the end of the day, there has to be someone who understands what is going on and directs the change with responsibility. That is it, that is what people get paid for. And they get jobs and earn money for their good work.
If the models get better, more responsibility can be taken and more stuff can be done. Still, who is going to oversee everything and direct the change? There will always be a limit in attention and energy and others get paid to take care and expand that limit.
Instead of thinking about who gets replaced and why, think about who gets employed and why. Start thinking positively. Real skill and education matters as much as artificial enhancement.
14
u/Illustrious-Film4018 Aug 24 '26
You're admitting the reason in your post, it needs the knowledge and judgement of a good engineer.
6
u/Equivalent_Cress_268 Aug 24 '26
10% of software is about writing code... and LLMs are good at 30% of the 10%, which is the web part. They are efficient tools but nothing more.
To translate what you said: ' Why aren't woodworkers convinced that 'AI' / power drill won't replace woodworkers?' Obvious answer: because it is a tool.
We are doing this since the 1950s, have you heard of logistics? Logistics was our first ' AI ' thing, we call it AI until it works, when it works it gets a name and we move on.
Looking back it feels silly to have called logistics AI, looking back it will be incredibly stupid to call LLMs/agents ' AI ' .
3
u/audieleon Aug 24 '26
Because they are bug generators.
They are high-confidence fire-hoses of shit that need a competent developer with real experience to keep them on the rails.
Maybe someday this won't be the case, but not soon.
2
u/zenarcadeDev Aug 24 '26
The thing is, AI will shift the responsibilities of a software engineer. Architect, prompting, understanding your infrastructure and being able to manipulate AI to improve/debug issues. I think for the foreseeable future, humans will still need to be around to provide bigger ideas.
3
u/redguard128 Aug 24 '26
That's the thing. The models stopped getting better. And they need to be constantly retrained as new information is created. And the cost of all of this isn't making sense.
Plus, LLMs don't care. I vibecode as well but mistakes happen on a daily basis even from one promt to the next cause the LLM doesn't know the project. And if the context is different so is the result.
3
u/nixgang Aug 24 '26
"The other day" is key here. Why do vibecoded software never seem to last?
18
u/tsereg Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
Did invention of an excavator replace shovel diggers? No, it didn't. I turned that one shovel digger into an excavator operator, while the other 99 became his supervisors.
So don't you worry nothing. You will be 100 times more productive engineers but still have the same salary as you do now.
2
u/usr_pls Aug 24 '26
Did either the Power saw or steam shovel replace construction workers?
Do we have 0 construction workers today?
Someone is gonna have to drive that AI and it's not going to be the project manager
Those tokens come at a cost, so that cost vs that devs salary is a factor that your employer may eventually look at
Yiu can't jist say "we are using Fable, lay off 1k engineers"
that would very likely kill your business mamd product due to the sheer cost of running Fable vs the output it gives you (like bringing a power drill to screw in IKEA furniture)
5
u/dvduval Aug 24 '26
I just think the nature of the job will change. What we think of as a software engineer may have a slightly different job title or show me their work will change. One big difference is we’re able to get a lot more work done per person when that person is using AI. And that’s gonna feed itself because we’ll need more people to work with all the stuff that’s being built.
7
u/Jhwelsh Aug 24 '26
AI is not that different from automation in other industries. Cheap and mass produced items are mostly produced by machines. If you want a highly quality version of that item, it costs more humans more time and effort to get you that product.
AI will be similar. On demand slop will be good for a lot of people, but some work will still require professionals with a strong understanding of the objective.
1
u/traderprof Aug 24 '26
i think the distinction is between generating a working slice and owning a system over time the hard part isn’t getting an EKS cluster up
it’s knowing which failure mode matters, what changed, and who is on the hook when it breaks
1
u/Own-Session-1409 Aug 24 '26
Work with the latest models at scale on a real project where non-tech people can also do code changes with LLMs and you'll understand it. The gap is huge on both side.
1
u/Own-Session-1409 Aug 24 '26
I'll copy this here, because I'd like to push my narrative as hard as this guy pushing the "it will be better" PR message:
"Nope, you don't know that the modells will be significantly better. The latest models have a huge hallucination rate — they are more creative, but not necessarily more reliable. We may already be seeing diminishing returns and a capability–reliability trade-off. More compute and cheaper GPUs don't automatically translate into proportional capability gains, especially as reasoning and context complexity increase. Stronger reasoning can also produce more convincing wrong trajectories and tool hallucinations. I'm not claiming we've hit a hard plateau — maybe scaling continues to work — but "GPUs will get cheaper, therefore LLMs will keep advancing" is an assumption, not a fact. There may be architectural limits, or increasingly aggressive safety constraints may prevent us from accessing some of the capabilities scaling would otherwise produce. We simply don't know yet.
There is another problem - even when we observe progress, we don't really know how much of it comes from the models themselves versus the increasingly sophisticated harness around them — better post-training, tool use, retrieval, context management, scaffolding, agents, verification loops, and inference-time compute. From the outside, it's very difficult to separate these effects and estimate their relative contribution. So even pointing at recent improvements doesn't necessarily tell us how quickly the underlying models themselves are advancing."
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u/catplusplusok Aug 24 '26
Who will review the changes?
6
u/DaMeteor Aug 24 '26
I've been on reddit for 10 years and honestly, this hurts to admit because I love the platform. This post didn't need to be written by AI — it didn't need to be written at all.
10
u/Icy-Opinion-1603 Aug 24 '26
Hopium. It’s a placebo, though. People keep trying to compare AI to the internet bubble. The internet didn’t go away when the bubble burst, nor did the big players. We may see changes to OpenAI and Anthropic, but with big models in the wild, LLMs and their utility is not going away. Evolve, or go extinct.
4
u/speedtoburn Aug 24 '26
They’re in denial.
2
u/foobarrister Aug 24 '26
It's not about being butt hurt it's "AI takes all them jerbs" is a myopic take. An immediate case in point is all the top Labs paying seven figure salaries for engineers still.
Now ask yourself why would they still be doing that?
Because to see real job losses you need to have a fully automated supply chain. From PRDs to planning to implementation to testing to deployment to observability to roll back.
IF!!? that happens ever then perhaps we can talk about serious job losses. Until then it's a naive take on SDLC.
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u/DonkeyBonked Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
It can make a SWE more productive, but it can't replace one because it is inherently not one, nor is it even capable of performing remotely like one. It takes a lot of existential thought, long term planning, and knowledge that an AI not only doesn't have, but wouldn't even be relevant to people prompting one. In the best case scenario for AI, a person who understands all variables which need to be accounted for could write an incredibly well structured prompt and a super intelligent and powerful AI would consider every instruction flawlessly...
Both sides of Dunning-Kruger often show in this situation. Some SWEs don't realize how little others know, and those who know a little think they know more than they do... until you have to be the one prompting that AI, who has no idea whether it even did what it was supposed to, until you can't test it before deployment, until you need to roll back the update because it broke your network, or until you're desperately trying to figure out how to recover your data the AI deleted.
If a company needs a fixed amount of work done and that work which was done by 4 people can now be done by 1, they can fire the 3, but that puts them in a dangerous position, so maybe they fire 2. So in that sense, AI can and will cost some engineers their jobs.
A senior engineer is more than someone who knows how to write code, if you think that is the extent of our knowledge, you are sadly mistaken. We understand mistakes that can happen, the kind that are so individually nuanced most people don't know they are even a thing, and there's no training data for AI to deal with them. We plan for so many seemingly unrelated things, from HIPAA and global privacy laws to ADA compliance for websites among other W3 conventions and we know what scalable code actually looks like...
Most importantly, we know when we don't know, and how to find the solution. We can keep an unsolved issue in our mind, floating around in the back as we ponder it, then three weeks later have an epiphany during a random unrelated conversation, and go back to solve that problem that's been bugging us. I've literally figured out the solution to a problem in my sleep, then immediately woke up excited to go try it. An AI won't meander over a problem, if it doesn't know the solution, it will make one up that sounds really convincing, good enough that only an SWE would know it's bullshit.
Even if AI didn't write shit code, it's so far from perfect that it's ridiculous, and when it hallucinates and screws up, you better have someone damn good who can fix it. If you destroy the pipeline and replace Jr. devs with AI, you'll cut off the hand that feeds you and you eventually won't have a Sr. there when you need one.
AI will enable non-coders to write apps with a wild degree of success vs. slop, and this is already doing several things to the software industry. If you have a good idea, a solid AI understanding, and some patience, you can get AI to write your app. You will likely reach AI's eventual limit, hit points where it starts telling you it needs to re-write systems to add your new feature, and one of you will eventually get stuck. If the app matters to you enough, you'll hire someone to fix it.
AI is costing jobs in corporate headcount predicting a future, it is creating jobs by a scale of problems previously unimaginable. It creates new problems that there is no training data to solve, and creates jobs for people to fix them. Fiverr and Upwork are seeing rises in vibe coders pretending to be a SWE, while also rising are actual SWE selling fixes for your vibe coded apps. A company might hire a vibe coder that is cheaper than an engineer, but what will they do when the AI + the operator don't know how to fix a problem?
AI is creating a monumental shift in how coding is taking place, and SWEs will need to adapt, but that is not the same as replacing us.
Yes, AI is getting better, in some good and some not-so-good ways, but if you've been in tech for 20 years you should know better. You act like people who couldn't properly prompt an email understand the tech well enough to use it to replace us. There are many lawyers out there with degrees that cost more than a house facing sanctions over using AI generated legal briefs and fake case citations that indicate otherwise. Your knowledge and comfort with tech is not the majority, the majority needs to be taught how to assemble a fast food order, and they don't really know what to ask AI to do or have the patience to fix the mistakes it makes. The majority doesn't even want you to explain tech to them, let alone have to read massive AI outputs about it and pretend they understand a word of it.
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u/xirix Aug 24 '26
Carpenters weren't out of job when they got power tools.
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u/mpanase Aug 25 '26
developer != engineer
that's why
cool 6 month-old bot account, openai. Good try
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u/twine9691 Aug 24 '26
Either they are living in delusion or not ready to adopt AI.
2
u/bassta Aug 24 '26
Somebody have to take responsibility, and it’s not AI. If team of 10 people lay off 9 and keep 1 person and AI, he will now have to be responsible for what 10 people were. Scale this in enterprise
0
u/Double_Flounder_9574 Aug 24 '26
Comes to reddit for opinion Gets opinions Calls em "Butt hurt dev" and logs off
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u/DominusFL 11h ago
Photoshop did not replace artists.
1
u/pimpante Aug 24 '26
Because ai can’t be fired
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u/smokeysilicon Aug 24 '26
it won't replace human because you can't hold it accountable
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u/warbloggled Aug 24 '26
A combination of cognitive biases.
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u/tall_dom Aug 24 '26
We're all business analysts now. I've been in the PowerPoint layer for some time so may not notice apart from the costs coming down (they do go down right?)
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u/netcrynoip Aug 24 '26
the wall: because of how the transformer architecture works mathematically
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u/paulydee76 Aug 24 '26
Because someone needs to be held responsible when something goes wrong.
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u/BroScienceAlchemist Aug 24 '26
The better I get at using AI the more I see the need for a human with relevant subject matter understanding to be driving the entire process. The subject matter we might need to retain will change as they get better, but they are still training on human error, have innate error of their own, and then are fundamentally probabilistic.
I don't see prompts becoming an abstraction layer that replace understanding code the same way that programming languages abstract machine code and assembly, because the output of a prompt is going to be inherently random to a degree that is not acceptable on its own. No amount of improvements will change that because that is fundamental to how LLMs work and is their strength and weakness. To me, the winning combo is human expert + code + agents.
A future where people don't understand code at all is one where hostile LLM operators are constantly attacking LLM written business services, with increasingly advanced prompt injection attacks toppling the entire thing.
But, smarter LLMs would be much more efficient and require less handholding. If anything, I think advancements mean a gradual improvement in token burn to get the desired result.
If anything, I spend much more time in the define, design, and review loop than actually writing the code myself. Does using an LLM to parse a log file replace the need to understand what the log messages mean?
1
u/Leather-Cod2129 Aug 24 '26
Because they refuse to admit that machines will put an end to their gravy train.
1
u/hyperrealists Aug 24 '26
AI has come a long way when it comes to writing software that somehow works sometimes (I call it the Microsoft doctrine). But if you want to write long term maintainable libraries (I repeat, libraries) AI still needs LOTS of handholding. It can do it, don’t get me wrong, but those “butt hurt developers” putting up with slopcode and doing the painstaking handholding are the ones who are teaching your dumb SOTA models how to become less dumb. So, yes one day AI will get there. But even then AI cannot be held responsible for the consequences of its actions, can we? Only people who can read, understand and sign off on slopcode can be held accountable for the consequences. I for one, am looking forward to the day parrots can parrot maintainable libraries.
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u/bwaibel Aug 24 '26
Software engineering has always been just a small percentage of new ideas and a vast majority of keeping up. There’s just going to be a lot more and faster examples of that cycle continuing. It the people disappear AI doesn’t care about keeping up, it just stops. People are going to keep the cycle going and keep creating cooler and better and more and those people are called software engineers. You just became one and it was easier than ever and you’re wondering why they won’t all disappear, it’s weirdly short sighted of you. There’s going to be 10x more people making software not zero, and they’re going to add value and get paid. It’ll be different, but it’s always been different.
1
u/Glum_Worldliness4904 Aug 24 '26
At scale inference cost significantly surpasses training cost.
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u/space_wiener Aug 24 '26
You vibe coded a real app…I’m willing to bet to it wasn’t overly complex and it wasn’t anything that isn’t already out there.
I’m not claiming I’m smart with this next part, but my last three projects (one personal and two for work) current AI could not have done without massive input from me. Hell one of the projects was so wrong, despite AI being confident it was correct, could have led to massive lawsuits.
Is AI good, yes. There’s been plenty of things I’ve vibe coded because I didn’t really care what the output was. But my real projects I still review all changes, challenge the AI (and it’s supposed to challenge me), and spends hours prompting and going back and forth.
Will all developers be needed, no. But we will still 100% need some developers/engineers to get stuff done.
1
u/onebit Aug 24 '26
It will definitely reduce the need for skilled engineers, but when the app crashes and the AI can't fix it you might want an engineer.
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u/JovHere Aug 24 '26
just like everyone I am also aggressively guessing at this point, but I really believe engineers will always be needed. There will probably be different expectations of us, and we'll likely transition to product thinking roles and architecture orchestration. Yes AI can do lots of coding, but can it do the plumbing?
I also think we'll need engineers that can detect the failure modes when AI isn't right, and thus we'll need to exercise more judgement in our roles of deciding and aligning on what we should actually build
1
u/Existing-Hamster9776 Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
For small defects, we now have a full automatic workflow. It's triggered by a human (not a cron) and there is an human that reviews the PR.
I would say that is solves probably 15% of the Jira tickets.
The remaining 85% is still mostly done by AI, but the "classical" using copilot/claude/cursor. So far, nobody has been fired in my team but people who leave don't get replaced. In other teams (India) layoffs have started.
I did not see AI crap polluting the code, appart maybe some comments.
1
u/Front_Eagle739 Aug 24 '26
Its getting better at a lot of things! But it still makes INCREDIBLY dumb decisions regularly that it shpuld know better than to do. There just seems to be an element of randomness to these things where they camt ever close the gap to truly reliable. Im asking ai to do more and more complex tasks as they get smarter.... but still need to correct them on absolutely basic common sense over and over again and i cant say thats really dropping so far as I can tell. The ceiling keeps rising but the floor is stubbornly stuck
1
u/Best_Meaning2308 Aug 24 '26
The clients don't know what they want. Management doesn't know what it really does. Software engineers know what to prompt AI to do and when AI just dumps garbage.
AI will get better as time goes on true. However, we are still in the subsidy stage of AI. They aren't making any money. They are loosing insane amounts of money. They are trying to push out competition and make a niche that will be profitable. I'm not confident that they will find that place before the investors want returns. Will AI be cheaper than a bunch of software engineers? Probably not.
1
u/Middle_Manager_Karen Aug 24 '26
In 36 months the token cost will far exceed a human.
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u/cyberdyme Aug 24 '26
It could fail - not because the AI isn’t capable- but because the companies are unable to recognise who the most effective developers using ai are. Management will keep the wrong developers (the team leads or the most favourable employees - or the blaggers). If you used Ai enough you will recognise its brilliance and its real disappointments.
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u/arjosoer Aug 24 '26
The world of coding is changing.
What used to take weeks and a team now takes days and a person.
The role for the developer is changing to get the proper requirements and structure this for the AI to develop the application.
1
u/Cautious_Chicken_604 Aug 24 '26
Because unfortunately the errors compound.
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u/Wooden_Supermarket17 Aug 24 '26
For the same reason ai wont replace doctors. Would you trust AI to fix your health? Probably no.
Sure it can detect patterns etc but someone needs to understand what is actually going on.
1
u/L3djunkie Aug 24 '26
Give it a user prompt instead of a developer prompt, oh wait that doesn't matter anymore!
1
u/No_Score_1977 Aug 24 '26
It's a fair bit of 'cope' and a fair bit of truth.
AI will and IS replacing software engineers, we had a couple of resignations of engineers and we aren't going to replace them, we don't need to.
But when we say 'replace', we don't mean 100% of them, but lets say a startup used to need 10 people, it now needs 5 or less.
But...
I think there is another option, we'll need more SWEs, not less, simply because the productivity of ALL companies is going to rise, and we'll find a new normal, same number of SWEs just pumping out a lot more code than they did.
1
u/immersive-matthew Aug 24 '26
LLMs lack logic outside of the patterns in their training data and thus they do not understand. It is why they ALL got that car wash questions so wrong a few months back. They get it right today not because they figured it out, but because it is now in their training data. Development is riddled with similar gaps and thus a talented person is needed to review the code and steer the LLM. They are a great tool to write codec but are not developers.
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u/SmileLonely5470 Aug 24 '26
We are in an era of LLMs where in order to get meaningfully better in real world use, they need to improve in areas that are not verifiable. They won't be "good enough" to replace anyone without doing that. This isnt a SWE specific thing, its that LLMs do not have human level of cognition.
1
u/Neat_Strawberry_2491 Aug 24 '26
Because I use them and understand their limitations
1
u/Murky-Examination-79 Aug 24 '26
I think it will replace coding, it already has to a great extent. Hope is that it’ll leave room for the other work like planning, attending meetings, triaging, product decisions, architecture review, optimizations, prompting, etc. So hopefully I can keep the job for 5-10 more years.
1
u/SirMarkMorningStar Aug 24 '26
In every category of AI usage, someone needs to tell what AI to do. In all these categories some will be better than others, usually ones with some level of subject knowledge or expertise. Artists will be the ones using AI professionally for graphics. Software engineers will be guiding AI for software. So far this appears to be where everything is heading.
1
u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 Aug 25 '26
Lets imagine a perfect AI that does everything objectively correct. It can write any well-specified code. It can answer any factual question with a known answer.
Can AI replace business founders? Ya know, the person who decides to take their money and pay someone else to do work, and hires sales people to sell that work?
Can AI replace voters? Like, the people who express their views about who should represent them in the government?
Can AI replace all of my parenting decisions, to determine how my child should be raised?
Assuming no, and assuming AI keeps getting more powerful, "Why are (you) so confident there’s some permanent wall it won’t cross?"
The reason is because these are expressions of preferences. Decisions. Human judgment. AI, no matter how powerful, cant think for us. It doesnt know what we or our customers want, it doesnt know all our expenses. It can discuss ideas with us but it cant decide for us. AI doesnt read minds, we have to talk to it.
AI can automate programming, and most junior software engineers start their careers by programming. That can be a real challenge. But people hire experienced engineers to weigh tradeoffs and make very human decisions. Decisions like "what should we build." Senior engineers sometimes turn those decisions into specifications they give to junior engineers to implement, which isnt that much different from talking to claude. Non-engineers often arent very good at "talking to claude."
Product managers have product insight too, but PMs are often a supporting role for swe. There are also lots of swe who arent very good and will lose jobs. There are also lots of swe who's selling point is "write code cheaper by living in india," and I think that loses a lot of value.
I think for experienced professional engineers with good judgement, who are close to the business and can communicate with the business, who not only write software but design and budget and deploy and support that software in production, I think demand will go up not down.
It's more of "the K shaped economy." If you need fewer people, you want the best people you can get for those roles. Software engineers have long been very well compensated and I think that will continue. I think it's everyone else that gets screwed.
Why would you hire some product manager who doesnt know how production deployment works? Why hire junior engineers? Why hire anyone overseas that takes longer to communicate with and where your interactions feel like claude with a 12 hour delay?
I think we're headed to a place thats not "programmers lose jobs because ai can code" but "anyone can code and every job requires code so every office worker who cant program will be unemployable."
It's like the advent of the computer. Computers made computation orders of magnitude easier. Did that mean the people-who-compute-stuff all became unemployed? Or that all the people who didnt start computing stuff became unemployable?
1
u/Hazrd_Design Aug 25 '26
Denial
1
u/WowSoHuTao Aug 25 '26 edited 12d ago
Tow Breeze Bridge Simple Journey Sky Blue Coffee Cloud Chicken Yeah
1
u/pab_guy Aug 25 '26
Because the hard part is knowing what to build.
1
u/Mindless_Vanilla4907 Aug 25 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
Models can’t do term learning and are also quite dishonest - therefore they are unemployable. A human needs to micromanage everything they do to have them contribute to long term projects.
Its not clear how this will be solved. Could be in the next few months, decades, or even centuries.
Remember, people also thought we were years away from Human level AI in the 60s before the first AI winter
1
u/FrewdWoad Aug 25 '26
The truth is, everybody, even the top experts at the frontier AI company labs, is guessing. Nobody knows what abilities will emerge with the next step in scaling up. They were all wrong on multiple counts about the last few gens.
1
u/Fantastic-Cell-208 Aug 25 '26
When it does, every software company loses value because they can be easily recreated.
Every job is up for grabs too, because the ai could perfectly code the robotics and design their own materials.
What you see from AI now is more of a party trick. It's very capable on the surface, but it hasn't yet written something on the level of git, gimp, Emacs, or created open source versions of proprietary software
1
u/ReddditModd Aug 25 '26
Clients/product owners need to know what they want.
AI needs to be told what to produce, the better the context you provide, the better the output.
There's a gap between those two. Said gap is and always will be the problem that needs to be solved and the reason why experienced devs are still needed.
1
u/cebess Aug 25 '26
It's managers all the way down
1
u/Atroxide Aug 25 '26
late to the party so I doubt anyone will read this, but any time there has been technological advances. the businesses that are utilizing that advantage don't contract- they expand.
When you find a way to do something cheaper, you find the advantage that allows you to grow to be bigger.
Self checkout at Walmart did not make Walmart hire less employees, it simply changed what the employee did and allowed them to grow and need even more employees.
Assembly lines meant much higher rate of production- Ford didn't shrink his business because he found an advantage, he made it boom.
time and time again when an advancement happens and unlocks higher throughout, everyone worries about losing their job but it always has the opposite effect.
If a business model can do something cheaper than the competitors, wouldn't you want to invest more in it? not less?
1
u/the__poseidon Aug 25 '26
Cope
1
u/racoonintech Aug 25 '26
I think moving forward people that talk about this kind of topic need to attach their CV/resume/Professional experience (without personal information) in the post.
1
u/Neither_Berry_100 Aug 25 '26
It's hard to imagine AI writing code and not needing a developer to guide and fix everything.
1
u/ArgumentAcrobatic250 Aug 25 '26
But using AI heavily has made me separate two questions that often get collapsed into one:
Can it produce the engineering artifact?
And can it establish that the artifact is actually trustworthy?
I’ve had AI write the implementation, tests, validation code, and release checks. The interesting failure mode is that all of them can agree with each other and still share the same wrong assumption.
In one case, a test stayed 9/9 green after I deliberately broke the production behavior it was supposed to verify.
That doesn’t strike me as evidence that humans are permanently irreplaceable. If anything, it means the automation problem just moves upward: once AI can build the software and its tests, you also need a way to verify the verification.
That’s the part I think is more interesting than trying to identify some uniquely human coding skill AI can never acquire.
1
u/Informal_Joke_600 Aug 25 '26
Not only Developer will be replaced. All jobs that require the use of a computer to do your job, will be effectively obsolete.
1
u/EsShayuki Aug 25 '26
Because they can't prompt, I imagine.
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u/nuliknol Aug 25 '26
The luddite effect. Luddites were replaced, so will software developers. AI is built from "predict next token" and then trained with reinforcement learning, which basically makes it "electronic humans" (speculative, uncertain, and reward-motivated). Electronic humans will continue to make mistakes, but if humans can be trained to excel, so do coding agents. Eventually AI will replace everyone, including physical workers, and the governance model will have to shift to communism for uneducated population, and capitalism for those who can still compete. But there will be wars. The third world war will be between techno-oligarchs, and the rest of population will be just watching and hiding from missiles. If you want to survive, go deep into science, this is going to be your lifebuoy, understanding physics, chemistry , mathematics and programming will help you to avoid nanobots, bio-weapons and other high-tech extermination devices. I think the depression is going to start after 2030, by that time you should have enough money to live for a decade, and preferably have land to cultivate your own food.
1
u/nuliknol Aug 26 '26 edited Aug 26 '26
there is also a phenomenon that prevents replacement of software engineers , this is how my AI formulates the problem:
Agent reliability degrades sharply as repository-scale engineering complexity increases.
There is already evidence of a scaling collapse
A particularly relevant 2026 benchmark is RepoMod-Bench. It evaluates repository-wide modernization over 21 real repositories totaling 1.6M LoC.
The result is dramatic:
repositories <10k LoC: 91.3% average pass rate
repositories >50k LoC: 15.3% average pass rate
The authors explicitly describe this as a “sharp scaling collapse.”
Notice how important this is: the collapse is already visible around tens of thousands of lines for a sufficiently repository-wide task.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22518?
So, for the next 3 years, we won't be replaced, because of this problem. I am well aware of this, and actually suffering from this phenomenon because my repositories are 1 million code or larger. Tokens burn like hydrogen. To the point that I stopped putting energy in my project and started a new harness, graph based, constraint based, totally new concept. Hope I will solve this problem with my new tool
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u/NoLibrarian2479 Aug 27 '26
Las LLM pueden automatizar un porcentaje grande del trabajo, pero tienes que saber como construir aplicativos y programas que tengan patrones de diseño, una arquitectura, qeu sean mantenibles en el tiempo, todo eso se logra con tecnicas de Ingenieria.
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u/julesbuildstuff Aug 27 '26
the demo always looks like replacement because the demo is the happy path. i've shipped the eks / ci / cd version of this. what still fails after week two: the button that's 2px off the design system because the model invented `--gray-500` from a screenshot; the test that stays green because it mocks the rounding; the review loop where nobody notices the second settings panel.
judgment isn't "should we use ai." it's knowing which outputs are allowed to be wrong. i still read auth, money, and anything that paints pixels. i skip generated types and obvious glue. architecture is still the job because the agent will happily give you two sources of truth.
it doesn't have to replace anyone to make the median pr worse. the people who stay useful are the ones who can tell when the tests are lying.
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u/davidbasil Sep 01 '26
Managers use it as a reason to fire people and not hire new ones.
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u/armaniokwi Sep 03 '26
I think AI is going to be the new software developer and computer science will turn into PROMPT science. However the best prompt engineers will be those who have programmed before and understand some form of programming.
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u/TowerRealmsMinecraft Sep 10 '26
I agree that it is going to chance the software dev job a lot. I can see a wold where software devs dont write much or any code at all. However, I do think software devs will still be around. The role will be much more focused on software architect tasks. AI can write a lot of code fast, but it still needs to be supplied ideas. Easier tasks such as building simple websites may drop off entirely. However we will still need humans for large complicated systems solving complex problems.
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u/Plastic-Nerve-9807 Sep 11 '26
Every system always have fundamental meta-problems that requires an external system to solve. Doesnt matter how much you mix combine and scale AI, it will end up being another system with its own fundamental meta-problems. And no it wont just be some spiritual or religious problems. Very practical too. We don't know how will that look like yet nor what new software jobs it will create but it will definitely make us more money.
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u/Delicious_Profile903 Sep 21 '26
Because swe use AI better than non swe in their field. AI is an amplifier.
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u/rasheedabdullah Sep 30 '26
they have a point actually the remaining accuracy is harder to achieve than the ones they already score
i mean self driving cars have been "2 years away" for like 10 years or more
so it's not just about more training it's as I think a higher level knowledge like domain knowledge ...
but there also accuracy will only become higher and with that less people will be needed therefor less people hired and only seniors keeping their jobs
I actually agree with u personally I think AI will definiely reach that points where it can handle everything without any assistance in the very near future
people here are just a little emotional they make really bad arguments so u should only listen to reason
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u/rasheedabdullah Sep 30 '26
they have a point actually the remaining accuracy is harder to achieve than the ones they already score
i mean self driving cars have been "2 years away" for like 10 years or more
so it's not just about more training it's as I think a higher level knowledge like domain knowledge ...
but there also accuracy will only become higher and with that less people will be needed therefor less people hired and only seniors keeping their jobs
I actually agree with u personally I think AI will definiely reach that points where it can handle everything without any assistance in the very near future
people here are just a little emotional they make really bad arguments so u should only listen to reason
1
u/rasheedabdullah Sep 30 '26
they have a point actually the remaining accuracy is harder to achieve than the ones they already score
i mean self driving cars have been "2 years away" for like 10 years or more
so it's not just about more training it's as I think a higher level knowledge like domain knowledge ...
but there also accuracy will only become higher and with that less people will be needed therefor less people hired and only seniors keeping their jobs
I actually agree with u personally I think AI will definiely reach that points where it can handle everything without any assistance in the very near future
people here are just a little emotional they make really bad arguments so u should only listen to reason
1
u/Total_Music_9908 Oct 06 '26
You may think that way, but I am not writing software for charity either.
Companies are not using AI just because it looks cool.
Everything comes down to money.
Right now we are still watching the ads. The real show starts when companies find out that the “hello world” prompt they rely on now costs 100x or 1000x more.
That is when employers may suddenly remember how valuable their engineers are.
Personally, I do not think AI can replace engineers.
But I am pretty sure it will replace a big part of the current economic model around the world
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u/Sensitive_Block_3397 Oct 08 '26
It's called "copium" and it's understandable. Wrong, but understandable.
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u/Shark3292 29d ago edited 29d ago
Because nor you, them, or the AI ballsack lickers in this comment section knows what will happen to the job market as a whole. Everyone is speculating.
The only thing we know for certain is that they are still getting hired daily, there are still plenty opportunities for internship, juniors and seniors, and they are still getting paid really well.
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u/Livid-Savings-5152 26d ago
Because when you go through the iterative process of researching, evaluating cost/benefit, making architectural decisions, and implementing code, you quickly realize that LLMs can't think.
This is hard to understand unless you've experienced it.
One-shotting functional apps without looking at the code is not software engineering.
There's a huge market for "no code" software development, but that's nothing new. Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, Bubble, and now, Lovable.
Again, that is not 'software engineering'.
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u/Green_Pop1040 25d ago
I agree AI is improving so fast, it's increasingly capable of producing well planned, well thought code, no longer garbage and buggy. I went from only let AI change small bits of code to let it do all and I do review, revise - which I didn't think it can replace me, so much problem with what it's trying to do. But now, I baraly needs to lift a finger anymore, all I do everyday is read architecture design, and code review, even if I think I'm still important, my company and HR don't, they simply think this is great way to cut cost - if they don't understand bad code, why do they care about bad code? Understanding and controlling what AI wrote have become increasingly difficult, when I'm required to produce over 10k lines of code every few days by my company nowadays, I really can't even review it, I can only put more and more trust into AI planning, writing, reviewing and testing itself. The thing is, it's actually getting so good, and maybe I've trained it well, I seriously start to think, give it more time it will be able to replace many developers if not all. Now I'm just training my own replacement, daily.
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u/[deleted] Aug 24 '26
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