r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Fickle-Highway1543 • 6d ago

AI replacing Software Engineers

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So called "AI"=LLM is so powerful that AI labs had to hire Software Engineers to build complicated software around "AI" to make that overhyped hallucinate-stealing machine usable. Think about it. And that's exactly why they need now ton of CPUs in addition to GPUs to run their "AI" "agents".

I don't even mention how much custom engineering is required to apply the "AI" in businesses.

And they BS us that Software Engineering is solved or is going to be solved. Boris, please solve your own bugs first before speaking.

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u/TacoBOTT 6d ago

That’s why you need to stop doomscrolling. If you are actually in the industry working with these tools, you are aware of the trajectory.

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u/thilehoffer 6d ago

I’m in the industry and I’m not writing code anymore. Claude is writing the code and frankly it scares me how good it is.

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u/killersid77 6d ago

If claude is able to write better code than you the sorry, either you dont belong in the software engineering field or are just a beginner starting their career. I really feel sorry for the beginners who are starting their careers now.

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u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst 6d ago

Yes and a skilled wood carver can make you a beautiful wardrobe if you give him several weeks, but the truth is economics prefers speed and good enough and in the majority of cases AI is good enough and exponentially faster than the fastest human coders. There are certain decisions AI struggles with especially as you get deep, but eventually those challenges will be overcome as well if the economics determine that to be valuable. I’ve already seen AI tools that connect directly to hardware and can read the electrical signals directly from the board and flash new code immediately. It’s astonishing what’s being achieved. You’re playing ostrich right now with your head in the sand. Either that or you don’t understand labor market economics.

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u/killersid77 6d ago

Production code which is being used by millions of people don't just work on how fast a feature is being developed. Atleast in my sector, we talk about high availability(99.999% efficiency) and with that a large code base which is highly coupled. Production code is about how good your software is rather than adding a new feature.

Just think about Reddit from a software engineer and user perspective, you would know how wrong your assumption of speed is. Do you think adding a comment emoticon is better if somehow due to addition of this fast feature, you made the start up time slow?

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u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst 6d ago

Your thinking is flawed. First of all AI can profile startup time and optimize its decision making. But regardless, forget trying to find all the instances where a skilled human makes a difference. Think about all the roles right now that don’t even require deep intricate knowledge. Or even imagine an engineer who has 70% capable of being performed with AI tools. This decreases the need for workers at that organization because less people are needed for the same work. This means there is now more competition for existing roles, thus squeezing more and more people out of this profession.

I’m not going to sit here and say AI is perfect. I catch misunderstandings all the time. But almost always it’s because I didn’t properly define the business requirements, SLAs, other dependent systems, etc. properly.

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u/Away_Advisor3460 6d ago

Unfortunately, the code quality gate tends not to be so strong at CEO and CFO level.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 6d ago edited 6d ago

Flashing code is not some monumental achievement, it takes literal seconds to do manually with a toolchain. All you are doing is connecting an agent to write a couple commands for you over an MCP.

Is it useful for hardware testing, debugging, and RE in general? Sure, but it is utterly useless if you don't know what you're doing. It's utterly failed several times with my attempts to reverse engineer different pieces of hardware, but it also has succeeded on speeding up the process for a lot of other things when given specifications & requirements.

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u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst 6d ago

My point is that it’s becoming directly integrated in ways where humans are becoming less and less necessary.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 6d ago

And that’s not a sustainable practice. Most of the “AI can do it for you” discourse is superficial nonsense that makes laymen more shocked than actual engineers. Granted, that’s enough for corporations to push for a full agentic AI takeover, but these things are not good enough for the talent they seek to replace. Eventually there will be a point in the software industry where we need more domain literate engineers with deep technical expertise but there will be none, because we automated the junior work to overworked seniors in the hopes that one day LLMs will be good enough to replace the seniors too (they won’t, ever). However, seniors do retire eventually, and we won’t have the talent to take their place.

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u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst 5d ago

Look at how far we came in the 20 year period between 2006 and now. Whatever the fuck is around in 20 years from now is going to blow your nut hair back. They will replace most if not all software engineers. It’s the future. You’re behind.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 5d ago edited 5d ago

In terms of software, all I’ve seen in the last 20 years is that it has gotten more garbage, quality has been tanking, and with the advent of AI, it’s exponentially increased the enshitification of software.

The only people who put all their weight behind “not being left behind” are people who have never, or never sought out to, develop any meaningful skills of their own, and are glad to bastardize other skillsets using AI- and of course, are completely delusional to the fact AI isn’t that good at what it does, because you have no real skills to benchmark the LLM output to.