Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?
I think the root is that change is scary and hard. As a dev, I feel that too, but I also think people are overreacting a bit.
Just like how COBOL still exists, traditional software jobs will continue to exist, it’ll just be harder and harder to find those roles as companies find more and more use cases for AI. But it’ll also take several years for companies to get on board. So I’m not too worried, though I can’t recommend my field to college students unless they’re really interested, because it could be a bumpy ride.
For me the other scary thing is the loss of control. We are already drowning in code everyone needs and noone understands and now we build systems, who can produce mountains of that.
But then again you could use it to explain code. We will so quickly become dependent on it.