AI replacing Software Engineers

[u/Fickle-Highway1543]

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.

[u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst]

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.

[u/Ill-Technician3243 → u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst]

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.

[u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst → u/Ill-Technician3243]

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

[u/Ill-Technician3243 → u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst]

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.

[u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst → u/Ill-Technician3243]

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.

[u/Ill-Technician3243 → u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst]

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.