Technology & Society202610 min read

AI Can Write My Code. It Can't Make My Engineering Decisions.

Is AI going to steal my job? Let's talk about revolutions, redundant programmers, and why writing code was never the whole point of software engineering.

Artificial Intelligence · Software Engineering · Future of Work · Tech Careers

Is AI going to steal my job?

"AI is going to steal your software engineering job!" Well, yes. But not exactly.

To start off, I'd like to speak about the Industrial Revolution. The first one, to be exact. Between 1760 and 1840, the world began shifting from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. It was a transition toward more efficient and mechanized manufacturing processes. It began in Great Britain around 1760, and by 1840, industrialization had spread to parts of Europe and the United States of America. It is, by far, one of the events that has had the most impact on this earth.

We went from producing things with manual labor to machines. I could get into this, talk about everything we created and how much it affected the world today, but I want to talk more about the social effect it had. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, a large portion of the population worked in agriculture. Self-employed farmers, tenants, landless agricultural labourers. It was common for families to produce their own food, weave their own cloth, and sew their own clothes. Naturally, agricultural communities were among the most affected. Many people were displaced from rural livelihoods as industrialization transformed the economy. They moved into industrial jobs as boilermakers, ironsmiths, mechanics, etc., as these industries now had machines that needed to be manufactured or repaired. Aside from all of that, it was a terrible time. Women and children were exploited since they earned lower wages than men, and industrialization contributed to many of the environmental problems we face today. Global warming, melting ice caps, animals going extinct, etc.

However, one of the fears spreading amongst people and communities was the fear of jobs being destroyed by the emergence of new tools for producing goods and services. After more than 200 years, we know that this wasn't the whole story. Some jobs went extinct, and many of them became personal hobbies rather than a way of making a living. But many, many jobs emerged from the First Industrial Revolution.

This story has repeated throughout every revolution. In the first, mechanization, water power, and steam power emerged. In the second, the assembly line was developed, which led to products being mass-produced, alongside the widespread adoption of electricity. In the third, we utilized computers and automation, and in the fourth, we built cyber-physical systems. In every revolution, roles died (or sharply declined), and others emerged. Handloom weavers were displaced by mechanized textile mills, but in turn, power loom operators emerged. During the Second Industrial Revolution and the decades that followed, knocker-uppers were gradually replaced by mechanical alarm clocks as they became cheaper and more reliable, while factory and assembly-line jobs became increasingly common. In the third, typists were dedicated primarily to manually typing and carbon-copying documents, and they were gradually replaced by software products and computers that reduced the need for their jobs. But software engineers emerged as an increasingly important profession because someone needed to write code, design applications, and maintain the computer architecture and systems running businesses.

And now we're here.

What's going to happen to Software Engineers?

Here's my opinion. I think that computer programmers are essentially useless. I said it, I said what I said. And before someone comes for my throat, let me clarify. I'm not talking about people who understand programming and use that knowledge to develop software. I'm talking about people who never moved beyond learning syntax, writing loops, and memorizing functions. People who know how to write code, but not necessarily what to build, why they're building it, or how everything works together. This conversation, I've had with people who know nothing about software engineering. People come over to me and say, "Well, AI is writing code for you now!" as if I've ever written code before AI emerged.

The truth is that, prior to OpenAI and Anthropic creating incredible AI models that can build full-scale applications, we rarely created everything from scratch! We often opted to use templates that were already available! We rarely ever received anything so new or creative that it required us to write code or develop an algorithm that had never existed before. The market was flooded with platforms like Joomla and WordPress, which, technically, were content management systems, but enabled us to create incredible websites without writing a single line of code. And on top of that, libraries and frameworks did a lot of the heavy lifting. Even when we had to jump in and write some code, it was often for a few components that had very likely already been created before and just needed some editing.

Anything you wanted to create probably already existed if you searched long and hard enough. It's a common idea in the industry that a good software engineer isn't necessarily the best programmer; a good software engineer is a good researcher. Software engineers and developers are called that for a reason. If our job was just to write code, we would be called programmers rather than "engineers." A software engineer's job is to build modular, maintainable, and reliable systems. Our job is to create a product that solves a problem, looks good, and is easy to use. We are the bridge that closes the gap between users and their computers. Our job isn't just to write code!

Engineer

/ˌɛn(d)ʒɪˈnɪə/

An engineer is a person who uses scientific, mathematical, and practical knowledge to design, build, maintain, and improve machines, structures, software, or public infrastructure.

I know you're gonna tell me, "But Lina, AI can do all of that now. It doesn't just write code!" Honestly, you're kind of right. But you're also wrong. As someone who has developed software with and without AI, I can tell you that AI doesn't consistently develop applications to the standards expected of a software engineer. You have to tell it how to develop the application. You have to tell it why. And it also still makes mistakes!! Even with incredible prompt engineering, you NEED to jump in sometimes and tell it to stop or change what the hell it's doing. Does it make things easier? Of course. Does it completely take care of everything without needing any human intervention? Hell no.

Here's an example. Let's say I ask AI to build a login system. It gives me a beautiful login page, connects it to a database, and everything works. Wonderful! But is it secure? What happens if the database goes down? Can someone access another user's information? Does it even handle errors properly? Just because an application works doesn't mean it's engineered well. To answer my question, I don't think software engineers are going anywhere. Not anytime soon, at least. Which brings me to my next question,

How does AI change things?

Obviously, for a lot of people, AI stole their job, even some software engineers. And in my honest opinion, I believe its because most developers know how to write code, but they don't know how to develop a system. AI forces you to become someone who thinks beyond if statements and loop conditions, and for the people who couldn't evolve in time, it was detrimental. As confident as I am that software engineering will continue to be a position (for the near future, at least), I can also confidently tell you that some AI company is going to create a model that will render us useless (unless the AI bubble bursts or crap hits the fan). On the bright side, even if software engineering as a role dies, so many other jobs are going to emerge. Machine learning engineers, AI software engineers, Cybersecurity Specialists and information security Analysts, Platform and DevOps Engineers, AI-Augmented software Architects / Senior Engineers, and so so much more. Even so, AI and coding assistants are not replacing software engineers, but they are shifting the landscape.

Instead of a single job swapping in for software engineers, routine and entry-level coding tasks are being automated. However, high-level technical, strategic, and machine-learning roles are expanding. So how are junior developers supposed to become senior engineers if AI automates the very tasks that traditionally helped them gain experience?

What about Junior Developers?

Now, here's something that genuinely concerns me. If AI is automating entry-level coding tasks, what happens to junior developers? How the hell are they supposed to become senior engineers if the very tasks that help them gain experience are being automated? Sure, AI makes software development more accessible, but it could also make breaking into the industry much harder. Companies might start expecting junior developers to have skills that traditionally took years of experience to develop. And how are they supposed to gain that experience if nobody's willing to hire them?

I don't think AI is necessarily eliminating the need for junior developers, but it's certainly changing what's expected of them. And while I believe we need to evolve alongside technology, we also need to acknowledge that you can't expect someone to become an experienced engineer without giving them the opportunity to gain experience in the first place.

So what's the solution?

I think that we need to change how we train junior developers. Universities need to focus more on teaching students how to engineer software rather than teaching 7 programming languages that each tell you how to construct and destruct an object in Java instead of C++. Companies need to stop expecting juniors to have five years of experience for an entry-level position, and developers need to learn how to work with AI rather than becoming completely dependent on it.

Instead of spending hours writing boilerplate code, juniors could spend that time learning how systems work, debugging applications, reviewing AI-generated code, and understanding why certain engineering decisions are made. That doesn't mean they should skip learning programming essentials. I mean, how the hell are you supposed to know whether AI is writing good code if you don't understand the code yourself?

And companies still need to invest in mentorship. Because if we stop hiring and training junior developers today, where exactly are we expecting senior engineers to come from tomorrow?

In Conclusion

This whole article does seem contradictory. First I tell you software engineers are still in rotation, then I tell you "Hey, here's a list of jobs you can do instead". The truth is, and to summarize, Software engineers will stay a thing for several years. But just like the 3 industrial revolutions before this one, we are bound to enter a new era. New jobs, new opportunities.