alt Hacker NewsThe answer is the AI. It's already handling complex issues and debugging solely by gathering its own context, doing major refactors successfully, and doing feature design work. The people that will be held responsible will be the product owners, but it won't be for bugs, it will be for business impact.
My point is that SWEs are living on a prayer that AI will be perched on a knifes edge where there is still be some amount of technical work to make our profession sustainable and from what I'm seeing that's not going to be the case. It won't happen overnight, but I doubt my kids will ever even think about a computer science degree or doing what I did for work.
I work in the green energy industry and we see it a lot now. Two years ago the business would've had to either buy a bunch of bad "standard" systems which didn't really fit, or wait for their challengs to be prioritised enough for some of our programmers. Today 80-90% of the software which is produced in our organisation isn't even seen by our programmers. It's build by LLM's in the hands of various technically inclined employees who make it work. Sometimes some of it scales up a bit that our programmers get involved, but for the most part, the quality matters very little. Sure I could write software that does the same faster and with much less compute, but when the compute is $5 a year I'd have to write it rather fast to make up for the cost of my time.
I make it sound like I agree with you, and I do to an extend. Hell, I'd want my kids to be plumbers or similar where I would've wanted them to go to an university a couple of years ago. With that said. I still haven't seen anything from AI's to convince me that you don't need computer science. To put it bluntly, you don't need software engineering to write software, until you do. A lot of the AI produced software doesn't scale, and none of our agents have been remotely capable of making quality and secure code even in the hands of experienced programmers. We've not seen any form of changes over the past two years either.
Of course this doesn't mean you're wrong either. Because we're going to need a lot less programmers regardless. We need the people who know how computers work, but in my country that is a fraction of the total IT worker pool available. In many CS educations they're not even taught how a CPU or memory functions. They are instead taught design patterns, OOP and clean architecture. Which are great when humans are maintaining code, but even small abstractions will cause l1-3 cache failures. Which doesn't matter, until it does.