I was wrong: AI Won't Overtake Software Engineering
Back in January I wrote, Normware: The Decline of Software Engineering and, while I think it was generally well-reasoned, I was wrong. Or at least overly ambitious.
I predicted that software engineering as a profession is bound to decline and be replaced by less technical people with AI that are closer to the business problems. I no longer think that will happen, but not for technical reasons, but for social reasons.
What Changed
I saw people code.
I wrote the initial piece after using Cursor’s agent a few times. Since then the tools have gotten even more powerful and I can reliably one-shot entire non-trivial apps. I told a PM buddy about how I was doing it and he wanted to try and… it didn’t work. Not at all.
What I learned:
- I’m using a lot of hidden technical skills
- Yes, anyone can do it, but few will
On the surface it was stuff like, I’m comfortable in the terminal, he was not. And I don’t freak out when I get a huge error. But also softer skills, like how I know what complex code looks like vs simple code (with AI coding, overly complex code will cause an agent to deadlock). Also, he tried including authentication in the earliest version (lol n00b).
For some people, those are merely road blocks. I’ve talked to a few people with zero technical background that are absolutely crushing it with code right now. It’s hard, but they have the drive to push through the hard parts. Sure, they’ve got their fair share of total flops, but they a strong will and push through.
Those are not common people. Most are weak, or just care about other things.
How It Will happen
I suppose this scene hasn’t unfolded and maybe my first take was right after all. But I don’t think so.
It’s likely that AI improves dramatically and makes it seamless to generate any code at any time. That will certainly increase the pool of people willing to suffer through coding. But I don’t think it can shift enough such that the Normware vision pans out. Most people just aren’t interested.
Instead, I think we’ll see a steady decline of “boring code” jobs.
Someone at a very large tech company told me they worked on a (software engineering!!) team that did nothing but make configuration changes. That’s nuts. Over time, I think AI will chip away at these roles until they’re gone and replaced by code that engineers (say they) want to write. Early prototypes and demo-quality software is already being replaced by AI, and the trend will continue from that end as well.