AI systems such as GitHub Copilot are increasingly capable of converting text prompts to working code.
Therefore the task of converting detailed English requirements to code might be largely replaced by AI in the future as these systems advance. In other words, the job of a junior software engineer could soon be automated.
But software engineers and especially senior software engineers are also responsible for defining and designing solutions for problems, thinking about architecture and other high-level concepts, and trading off factors such as performance, customer experience, and security.
My advice would be to become a generalist with many different independent skills so that if one task is automated, there will be other tasks to do.
Bear in mind that software engineers can use tools like Copilot to enhance their productivity and a human-AI pair is more effective than either alone. Humans will only become redundant when the AI alone is as effective or more effective than the human-AI pair.
This happened with chess: there was a point where humans playing with AIs were better than AIs alone but now AIs are so strong at chess that human players don’t enhance the chess-playing ability of AI.
Human software engineers will probably eventually be fully replaced by AI but I don’t expect it to happen until we have AGI because unlike chess, software engineering requires performing many different tasks.
AI systems such as GitHub Copilot are increasingly capable of converting text prompts to working code.
Therefore the task of converting detailed English requirements to code might be largely replaced by AI in the future as these systems advance. In other words, the job of a junior software engineer could soon be automated.
But software engineers and especially senior software engineers are also responsible for defining and designing solutions for problems, thinking about architecture and other high-level concepts, and trading off factors such as performance, customer experience, and security.
My advice would be to become a generalist with many different independent skills so that if one task is automated, there will be other tasks to do.
Bear in mind that software engineers can use tools like Copilot to enhance their productivity and a human-AI pair is more effective than either alone. Humans will only become redundant when the AI alone is as effective or more effective than the human-AI pair.
This happened with chess: there was a point where humans playing with AIs were better than AIs alone but now AIs are so strong at chess that human players don’t enhance the chess-playing ability of AI.
Human software engineers will probably eventually be fully replaced by AI but I don’t expect it to happen until we have AGI because unlike chess, software engineering requires performing many different tasks.