This is a bit of glib answer. Most of the time is spent coding which encompasses typing, retyping, and retyping again. It also includes banging your head against the wall while trying to get one of your rewrites to work against and under-documented API.

OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to get the drill string put together. They went in with a plan, but the reality didn't agree and they are on a tight schedule.

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time.

There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%.

> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions

The AI is coming for that too.

You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not even the majority of devs.

People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.

I remember being that kid in high school who ran math and logical problems hard which contributed to me being very technical and to learn to push through painful mental challenges on the regular. Out of most of my graduating class there were not many of us that went on to become engineers for a reason because it isn't easy work by any means and I'm guessing is quite draining for people who don't use their brain like we do.

So while AI will change the industry I don't see any reputable company firing the smartest ones in the room for junior level intelligence.

Even with it advancing someone has to be responsible for when it screws up which we know it will.

Not sure where I first heard this, but I say it to my team all the time: "Programming is thinking, not typing"

Isn't the long term trend just that we don't need as many engineers, not that there will no more software engineers?

Theres another, different loop I keep seeing which is:

  - Company A lays off engineers citing AI efficiencies
  - People say its because of over hiring during 2020
  - Company B lays off engineers citing AI efficiencies
  - People say its because it was never a good business
  - Company C lays off engineers citing AI efficiencies
  - People say its because theres a recession

The problem is people think AI can replace the 95-95% that isn't code too. That's where we end up with massive unusable codebases that no one understands.

Only 5% of your time is spent writing code? That sounds like a low estimate for most software engineers I work with.

May I ask if you could estimate how you spend the other 95% of the time?

In my community almost all problems are political. "Problem solving ability" matters if you are HFT, but everything else? Math can't tell you the best way to use land, educate a kid, what to pay for healthcare and how, how to prioritize biotech research, set a minimum wage, decide congressional maps, all sorts of stuff that actually I pay for or care a lot about. in fact I think you are totally misinterpreting what people are saying to you, you are 200% wrong: the 2-3% of your time spent coding was the valuable part, and your so called problem solving ability rarely solved any real problems.

And most of the time the statistical aspect of LLMs result in a less creative solution that is more expensive to run and harder to maintain. LLMs at this stage are good at scaffolding, generating the boilerplate you do not want to write and glue things together quickly. It just makes engineers faster.

You don't think AI is going to be able to understand things and apply their ability to formulate solutions better than you, in the near future?

> Business owners who think they can do without developers because they think LLMs replace developers are fine by me too. Natural selection will take care of them in due course.

Thing is, natural selection will take care of you at the same time. Because you'll also come to rely on products they make, or services they offer, either directly or indirectly. So eventually, you too, will suffer the consequences of the enshloppification.

You’re a ”developer“, i guess, but not a coder (anymore), which is what your interlocutors are probably asking about. You’ve migrated to a middle manager job, not something they probably can just start doing competently. Essentially you’re agreeing with their initial sentiment, that coders will be made irrelevant.

The "apply my ability" is doing a lot of work, so to speak, in the above exchange. Work that might eventually well be automated away.

That doesn't hold because the goal for executives is to increase revenue and the main sales pitch of Anthropic et al is to pay for agents instead of paying for engineers. That means 80% of the workforce is out no matter what. Whether or not one belongs to the remaining 20% is a different story, but obviously not all of us will be there.

> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions

AI is coming for that too. Don't be naive

This is exactly it. The speed of light has not changed: we're limited by our ability to understand the system, and make decisions about what to do next. AI will speed that up, but the core work is the understanding and decision-making.

Saying otherwise is sort of like reducing the task of writing a novel to typing.

Something missed in that computer science was a highly theory driven discipline where people were taught how to think critically about solving complex problems. Industry complained they weren’t teaching enough programming skills, so they dumbed down the thinking part and emphasized the vocational part. Now the vocational part is virtually useless, and the grounding of theory applied to complex problems is suddenly really relevant again. Schools will take time to retool their programs, teaching staff, and two generations if not three graduates will have entered into a work environment that doesn’t need what they learned.

As someone 35 years into my career I agree this is the most exciting part of my career. I love programming and I do it all the time but I do it by reading code and course correction and explaining how to think about the problems and herding cats - just like working with a team of 100 engineers. But the engineers I’m working with now by and large listen, don’t snipe me on perf reviews, aren’t hallucinating intent based on hallway conversations with someone else, etc. This team of AI engineers I have can explain to me their work, mistakes, drift, etc without ego and it’s if not always 100% correct it’s at least not maliciously so. It understands me no matter how complex the domain I reach into, in fact it understands the domain better than I do, so instead of spending a few months convincing people with little knowledge or experience that X is a good idea, I can actually discuss X and explore if it’s a good idea or not and make a better informed decision. I’ve learned more in these discussions than I’ve learned in decades of convincing overly egoistic juniors and managers to listen to me about something I’m an industry authority on.

However I see very clearly we will need very few of the team of 100 human engineers I can leave behind in my work. Some of will be there in a decade, but maybe less than 1:10. This is going to be a more brutal time than the Dotcom bust for CS grads, and I don’t think it will ever improve. Mostly because we simply won’t need the “my parents told me this makes money” people, just the passionate folks remain. But even then, we face a situation where the value of any software developed is very low because so much software is being developed. It’s going to turn into YouTube where software that is paid for is very small relative to the quantity of software developed. We already see this in the last few months with the rate of GitHub projects created. If the value of any software created is low, the compensation of the creator will be low unless they’re very rare talents.

Because that classifies in "developers" and "software engineers". And software engineering isn't going to disappear anytime soon

You miss the major factor in your compensation: pricing pressure due to supply/demand.

By removing all the junior engineers, you've fundamentally changed the market forces longer term and most people expect that to negatively impact you in the supply demand curve regardless of whether or not the statements you've made above are true, which they most likely are for senior engineers.

  - Compilers will make developers irrelevant
  ...
  - Compilers can write assembly language code

  - Compilers have -O3 now

Maybe we should rejoice. I remember dreading writing documentation, and now I would happily hand that off to AI.

> Multiple times per week I have the same conversation.

Really? I mean, good on you if it's true and you like the attention but that's sounds like an implausible amount of interest in someone and their relatively mundane profession.

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now.

I spent 2nd half of my 30y career fixing organizations and process where this was the case. so many things are wrong in places where this is the case (or alternatively you need a different job title :) )

This is maybe a bit myopic.

Dude - look what happened in the last 2 years on software.

Now project out another 10.

I totally agree with you 'as of now, in the current paradigm'.

But that could very well change.

I dunno, man. I've been doing this for 20+ years and I think we're at a really important fork in the road where there are two possibilities.

The first is that AI is achieving human-level expertise and capability, but since they're now being increasingly trained on their own output they are fighting an uphill battle against model collapse. In that case, perhaps AI is going to just sort of max out at "knowing everything" and maybe agentic coding is just another massive paradigm shift in a long line of technological paradigm shifts and the tooling has changed but total job market collapse is unlikely.

The other possibility is that we're going to continue to see escalating AI capability with regard to context, information retrieval, and most importantly "cognition" (whatever that means). Maybe we overcome the challenges of model collapse. Maybe we figure out better methodologies for training that don't end up just producing a chatbot version of Stack Overflow + Wikipedia + Reddit. Maybe we actually start seeing AI create and not just recreate.

If it's the latter, then I think engineers who think they are going to stay ahead of AI sound an awful lot like saddle makers who said "pffft, these new cars can only go 5 miles per hour."

The true argument is about quantity - of people, not code. All qualitative arguments are missing the point.

Saying being a programmer is about writing code is a bit like saying being an artist is about drawing lines on a canvas.

Yeah technically drawing lines on canvases may be an very important part of being a painter, but it is hardly the core of what makes or breaks great art.

What you described are senior developers and system architects.

Junior developers spend most of their time writing code (when they're not forced to attend pointless standups, because Agile/blah/blah)

> The developers who still think their job is about writing code will perhaps not have a job in the future.

So you're saying the same thing everyone else is saying. SWEs won't go away, but they will be greatly reduced, because those whose job is about writing code -- junior devs -- will be replaced.

(How will Sr Devs in the future be created? That's the question, isn't it.)

>- I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions

  - Well, and AI can do part of that too, maybe more of it soon.
  - ...
  - Besides, you don't need 10 guys in a team to do that. A couple of them will do, then AI will do the coding. What will happen to the rest?
  - ...

I think the future is pretty up in the air in this respect, but my guess is that AI will just lead to another shift in the set of knowledge that a 'real programmer' is expected to have. I'm old enough to remember when people would make fun of web developers for 'programming' using HTML and JavaScript. And of course, back in the day, you couldn't be a real programmer unless you wrote assembly language. In a few years' time, being able to write (as opposed to read) source code in any specific programming language will probably become a niche skill. The next generation will be able to read Python to about the same extent that I can read x86 assembly.

Perceptions of what knowledge counts as 'low level' are constantly shifting. These days, if you write C, you're a low-level, close to the metal programmer. In the 70s, a lot of people made fun of Unix for being implemented in a high-level programming language (i.e. C) rather than assembly.

Note that just because you know the job is understanding things, the manager who'll boot you and leave you without income probably doesn't. They'll just get their political cookie points for saving money by replacing you with AI.

Pure wage workers should consider dropping the attitude about how tech progress will just make their inferiors in the same line of work be out of a job (hrmph good riddance etc.). Because this pseudo-progress could creep up on them as well.

Then you won’t have this just world of the deserving workers at all. Just formerly deserving workers and idiot billionaires like Musk (while the robots do all of the work).

I normally say that I have zero concerns regarding AI in terms of employment. At most I am concerned in learning the best practices on AI usage to stay on top of things.

It's ability to write code is alright. Sometimes it impresses me, sometimes it leaves me underwhelmed. It certainly can't be left to do things autonomously if you are responsible for its output.

Moderately useful tool, but hellishly expensive when not being subsidized by imbeciles that dream of it undrrmining labor. A fool and his money should be separated anyway.

What I am really concerned about the incoming economic disaster being brewed. I suspect things will get very ugly pretty soon.