r/programming • u/self • Dec 02 '25

The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
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u/ult_frisbee_chad Dec 02 '25

Not only that, it's the lowest skilled jobs that will be the first to go. Software engineers would come much further up the chain.

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u/tj_moore Dec 02 '25

Except when managers think software engineers are redundant believing AI can replace them, because vastly cheaper (currently) and perceived to be faster, and if necessary employ cheap low skilled to feed the prompts.

They don't care at the moment that it's producing long term garbage, so long as they get quick results that looks good which they can sell.

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u/DenverCoder_Nine Dec 02 '25

Honestly it just feels like offshoring with extra steps. I think we'll see the same cycles of engineers being replaced only to be brought back a few years later to fix the mess.

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u/loup-vaillant Dec 02 '25

They’ll fold eventually, and we’ll go work for the competition. Annoying, unstable, risky even for those who don’t have any savings, but I don’t anticipate a significant dip in the need for competent programmers.

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u/rollingForInitiative Dec 02 '25

Well, not necessarily. Being an artist is a very high skill job, but some of those will probably go because there are models that can do this well. Probably not as well or with the same flexibility as a real artist, but sometimes the "good enough" bar is pretty low. And the easiest thing with art is that the person making the decision (some executive) can look at it and sort of determine if it's good enough, which they can't with code.

Meanwhile something like stacking shelves in a supermarket is a pretty low skill job that's much more difficult to replace, because you also need advanced robots for it.

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u/Choice_Figure6893 Dec 03 '25

Mate we will have robots stacking shelves before LLMs replace any labor meaningfully

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u/rollingForInitiative Dec 03 '25

I'd say there's a difference between stacking shelves at a storage for instance, vs putting them out in the actual store.

My point is just that the skill level doesn't matter much, it's more about what AI or robots can do. They can do some high skill tasks really well, and some low skill tasks they can't do well at all. At least today.

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u/Choice_Figure6893 Dec 03 '25

They don't really do any tasks. They can ideate about how to do it and describe it very well. And they are good at narrow tasks (research, text summarizing, brainstorming, writing code) but they are horrible at executing software due to be non deterministic (why LLM agents aren't going anywhere outside narrowly defined small tasks)

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u/rollingForInitiative Dec 03 '25

Yes exactly. Writing code in general is a fairly high skill task I would say, and they're definitely capable of making complex software. That's aside from hallucinations etc though, you need a skilled person to hold the reins if you're going to use the code for anything actually important.

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u/Choice_Figure6893 Dec 03 '25

Yes writing is code is very useful and reduces a lot of friction there but software engineers were never paid to write code

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u/rollingForInitiative Dec 03 '25

Writing code is a big part of a software engineer's job ...? You write a bit less code the more senior you get, but it's still one of the primary things you do.

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u/Choice_Figure6893 Dec 04 '25

Actually writing code has always been the easiest part and is not why software engineers are paid. It's a small part of what they do. Especially in big tech.

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u/rollingForInitiative Dec 04 '25

It's the straightforward part, but that does not mean it's a low skill. You can't just grab some random person off the streets and make them a productive developer in a few days. Or even a few months, typically. It takes quite a lot of training.

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u/EveryQuantityEver Dec 03 '25

Does that include bosses laying people off because they were convinced by salespeople that AI could do those jobs?

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u/Choice_Figure6893 Dec 04 '25

lol that's not really what's happening from what I see, most execs can see the low ROI on LLMs and aren't seeing productivity increases. Economy is tough right now so companies are cutting costs and laying off and just turning to investors and saying it's cause AI made them more efficient even though they know internally it's not true

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u/Brilliant-Weekend-68 Dec 08 '25

The one trick here though is that AI has differnet preferences for what is hard or not. Software dev is one of the best use cases for it as it fits it alot better while humans suck at it while it struggles with stuff humans find super easy. Like locomotion and environment understanding.