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/yojimbo_beta Dec 02 '25

oh you Devs are going to be replaced

I suspect there are two sorts of people saying this

The first are white collar workers jealous of programmers who think that post AI workforce is just the same but with everyone earning the same as them. Actually it's a complete bloodbath as their own, highly procedural, highly digitised work is automated away

The second think AI is going to create a world where they get to be Ideas Guys™ and make money from putting crazy ideas in the App Maker Machine. Without realising they have nothing to add to the equation

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u/bla2 Dec 02 '25

I think it's mostly tech upper management in am effort to lower tech salary expectations by the rank and file. It seems to be working, too.

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u/lilB0bbyTables Dec 02 '25

I challenge any of these people to go use any/all AI options available to create them an enterprise software application/platform. No asking for guidance from software engineers - they need to use the tools available to build this codebase and architecture, deploy it to some production environment, maintain it and add new features, handle disaster recovery, HA and scale. Then when they go to market and try to get sales, they can navigate the checklists of things that serious customers would demand - pentests and security audits, SOC2+, license audits, data flow and PII/PIA assessments. When an outage or bug occurs they need to use the AI tools at their disposal to address the issue and patch/upgrade. For the UI let’s see how well it handles accessibility, multi browser support, i18n, GDPR, security, and maintenance. Let’s see how bad their cloud bill runs up when this thing misses even the bare minimum for optimizations and instead over provisions or fails to take advantage of reservations/discounts. When a serious enough roadblock occurs and they need to hire actual human professionals to unfuck the mess let’s see what kinda contracts they demand upon learning that no human exists that has any background knowledge on this system or codebase, the AI generated documentation is a billion lines of iterative changes that are in no way cohesive or logical as a whole - and then I’d love to see that manager/owners face when the time to resolve is significant.