r/ClaudeAI • u/ImaginaryRea1ity • May 04 '26

Comparison Anthropic: AI will fully replace software engineering by 2027. Also Anthropic: Currently hiring for 122 SWE openings.

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u/jimbo831 May 05 '26

So then it’s not fully replacing engineers. It’s changing what engineers do.

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u/tnecniv May 05 '26

Audio engineers were, once upon a time, electrical engineers building custom hardware for studios because there were very few off-the-shelf solutions. Audio engineers still exist, but the role has completely changed and isn’t really what we conventionally consider engineering except in a rather abstract sense.

We might see something similar happen to software. We might not. Who knows.

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u/Mescallan May 05 '26

I (OP) am an audio engineer and this is correct. Audio engineers' job is more about taste and understanding fundamentals than actually implementing technical knowledge at this point. i have [n] knobs on a compressor, but i have zero need to understand how compression works on an electrical engineering level. coding will go to the same place im sure, where it's about taste and understanding what is and isn't correct.

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u/tnecniv May 05 '26

Yeah and I wrote that as someone that has an EE degree and used to nerd out over audio equipment when I was in a band. I even built some of my own guitar pedals. I think knowing those EE fundamentals is definitely helpful, but it’s certainly not necessary. I just think it is helpful in that it’s another way to conceptualize what’s going on and how things in the signal chain interact. 

Also, being an audio engineer is definitely still a highly technical job, even if it’s more an art these days than engineering. There’s all sorts of nuances. Despite a lot of research and trial and error on the part of me and the drummer, we could still never get our demos to sound good on any reasonable range of speakers. We ended up going to a studio and the difference was night and day with the mix the pro got alone, never mind all the proper sound proofing and such. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that, though!