I don't get this reasoning, and yet it is pervasive. Just because non-engineering people come up to you with apps they have created does not mean AI has or will replace software engineers.

Consider:

- I can read about my symptoms from Dr. Google, try a lifestyle change, herbal remedy, or over-the-counter drug, and that may actually work. This does not mean in the slightest that doctor are being made obsolete

- I can create music with generative AI, without needing any understanding of music theory, no taste for music, no creativity. This does not mean people with musical talent are being made obsolete at all.

- I can, with the help of AI, work on DIY projects around the house. This does not in any way mean engineers are being made obsolete.

Who will be helping domain experts to elucidate what they actually need through prototype-refine cycles? Who will be writing and maintaining the operating systems, the languages, the version control systems, th editors and terminal emulators, knowledge/document management systems, the PaaS platforms, etc that these hordes of hobbyist software creators depend on?

Have these people actually properly tested their creations to ensure they are robust? Do they even understand the edge cases that could arise? Is their work secure? Cooking up some quick thing based on some prompt does not equate to engineering whatsoever.

Perhaps you fail to see this because, like many others, you subscribe to the fallacy that the value of software engineering primarily lies in the code produced itself, the arrangements of bits manufactured. It is not; a project is primarily valuable as a theory and abstraction building process. See https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Generation and maintenance are very different beasts.

There are engineers that work making a 2 weeks app that is never revisited again, I guess, but I don't know anyone that makes a living from that. Maybe the "WordPress site for your business" gigs.

The issue comes when you have 432 functionalities and have to add the 433 without interfering with the others. Or when you cant afford slightly wrong. Or when each functionality adds complexity at a higher rate than an engineer and over time the projects gets to an unmanageable size.

Deploying software has been reduced to just running 'vercel' in the terminal, something the agent has zero problems with if they were to just ask. Distributing desktop software is a bit harder depending on the platform.

The gap between a pet project and great software is still very wide and I have a hard time believing that it will ever be bridged.

I don't see how a solved problem even before ai is the thing that won't be replaced first. I struggle to believe a personal project requires complex infra

We have an instance where the non-tech team has started building tooling for themselves (because the technical team is overburdened with work).

Essentially a small application idea that interfaces with the larger system. It was POC built in 2-3 days, 3 or 4 commits.

Impressive - however the person that built it has now made 400 more commits over the last 3 months to this project as it has been modified, it’s essentially become his part / full time job to just build + maintain this new application.

They have become a software developer. An untrained one, one that doesn’t understand security or best practices. Maybe as Claude gets better the load will be lightened and it will not consume their day, but as it stands - at my company, all of these initial “vibe apps” are becoming maintenance for them, taking up more and more of their time. It’s obvious that they want MORE software, not less. So traditional software engineering is probably gone, but managing expanding platforms and handling security, complexities, documentation, business logic, all of that is still standing in the way for my company.

So you are correct saying that people can build projects with text, but I feel that “set and forget” has never been the case for all but the simplest software. Someone still has to manage all of it, I think. Whether trained in SE or not.

My guess is that developers who have experience can still outperform untrained people, though the builders who are curious by nature will quickly get up to speed. The game is changing but traditional developers have a huge upper hand, because we’ve always wanted to know how things work under the hood. I could have built the current vibe app that they built in a hour using AI, it’s taken them months.

For most apps, delivery has been some equivalent of “git push heroku main” and setting a DNS record for like 15 years. That’s especially true for most of the apps being vibe coded today.

The fact that “cloud engineer” is still a job suggests that the simple case is not the one driving employment. There are definitely more devops/sre/cloud engineer roles today than there were in 2009 (and I’d be willing to wager you if you included pre-devops sysadmins in that count, there’d still be more total roles today).

AI-assisted coding is great, but vibe coding IMO is only good for disposable prototypes.

You're not going to vibe-code a financial app that needs to be maintained indefinitely.

You're also not going to mess with legacy systems.

I think that AI has definitely replaced _some_ engineers, but I don't think your use case is relevant. Your non-engineering friends have created their pet project because they now can, but it's not as if they were going to hire anyone to do it, right? They haven't up until now.

The thought experiment I like to have is imagining my company running without engineers and just LLMs. The thought of my CEO or sales guys sitting down and reading/redirecting LLMs all day is just hilarious. My CEO is highly technical but he has other shit to do. The first thing they'd do is hire someone to do that for them, and the best person for that task is someone who knows how things _should_ be.

Now they'll probably get someone on discount, because our salaries are going to tank due to evaporating demand, but I sincerely doubt it'll be zero-d demand.

What I expect is a 3D printer moment - tons and tons of homebrew / shareware style software coming out, an explosion of boutique code.

I also expect a CNC machine moment - vastly reduced demand for hands-on specialists, and more babysitting of automted processes. But it's those machinists who got those jobs.

We could be looking at a long term suppression (~80% reduction?) in demand though until economic growth produces enough demand to employ ~50M software engineers again, if ever. The cliff is unlikely, I'd guess the unregretted loss will be replaced by AI productivity every year, and some portion of growth will, too.

I also guess that all the AI companies can become massively successful without causing much unemployment just by following Claude's model - charge a certain tangible % of a salary for assisting the worker. https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-jobpocolypse.html

Yeah, it won't. SWE here with a sidegoal to tackle the deployment side through various means (homelabbing, grabbing sre/cloud/observability tasks at work).

The biggest observable improvement in my post and pre ai development is the ability to tackle two projects at once, if the agent is on track. If not, and I have to do a deep dive to debug, it basically regresses to plain old everything like before.

LLMs can now quite trivially write Terraform or Ansible code to setup infra, maybe harder for non-engineers to make those prompts for now. But ongoing maintenance and monitoring would require an online agent evaluating signals and deciding when to take what action or prompt the user. Like autoscaling decesions can be already automated and some failover/recovery for simple cases. Probably people releasing hobby projects do not need too much. And then there are things like exe.dev to wrap that and make it simply to give an execution env instead of you and your agent managing your own infra.

"has already replaced several software engineers. "

I think this is incorrect, unless your friends employed software engineers, or would have employed software engineers.

What you're describing is an effect that has always existed. It became clear to me a few decades ago earlier in my career that if a dev's only real skill was "write code" that they were severely limited compared to people who had strong domain knowledge *and* had "write code".

The tech boom has made people forget this, but that fact never changed. And now what we're seeing is that the "write code" part is increasingly becoming devalued. What does this mean? That those with domain knowledge will still be able to function, whereas people who could only write code will be devalued.

That's an interesting point of view, because one of my most successful uses of AI is automating all of the DevOps drudgery that I need to do but just couldn't find the time to dedicate writing (and maintining) tools to automate more of it.

I wouldn't say software engineers have been replaced. Rather, those software projects would never have gotten created in the first place.

> who have now been able to create their pet projects

> So in my anecdotal case, AI has already replaced several software engineers.

Those projects wouldn't exist without language models to begin with. That means in your anecdotal case AI hasn't replaced any SEs.

Same way 3D printing replaced all common goods, can be done by anyone. Why not just print it yourself?

> It most certainly will replace software engineers.

I would say it will most certainly replace software developers. There is a subtle difference between these terms.

> It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers.

I don't know about that. If a non-engineer is able to replicate your "serious" project from scratch as a "pet project" then perhaps it is not serious in the first place?

> So what they are missing is a platform to easily deploy and maintain their projects, much like a "normal" developer would.Right now it's quite tedious to set up this scaffolding, but it's absolutely possible with AGENTS.md, skills and rigid hollistic tests. Once done, non-technical people can continue developing independently without hiring any software engineers by simply telling claude/codex what they want.

You should already know that maintenance is never free. The big question is are they making money out of it to justify that maintenance?

Maybe it has replaced people that build useless pet projects that make no money, especially internal tools such as dashboards. But again once an incident arrives is when you need someone to untangle that vibe coded mess as it grows in complexity.

There's no lack of such platforms for more than 5 years, they all have free offers and software engineers still have jobs.

A “cloud engineer” is orders of magnitude easier to replace than a programmer - there are entire SaaS products that have been trying to be a drop-in replacement for your career since AWS was out of the gate.

The fact that you still have a job should clue you in that this isn’t going where you think it is, regardless of the state of your friends’ pet projects.

Ruby on Rails generators could build toy projects in like 3 clicks 15 years ago, a Twitter clone being the famous one.

Software engineers still continued to exist somehow.

In your example, those projects were not the domain of engineering. Your friends couldn't afford expertise and those projects never would have been made before. Therefore, these are net-new projects that replace nothing that came before.

This is common in technology, especially software, that improvements in efficiency make software cheaper and expands the total pool of possible software.

And, even if one of the "one button shipping" platforms (and there are many) was hooked into the agent, your friends will hit major problems that they and their AI cannot solve. Whether its tech-debt hell, a major security breach, or something else, any sufficiently complex project will require expertise. Will be a fun day when a European regulator asks a friend about their GDPR compliance and their agent is like "shrug"

Why is scaffolding a PaaS project beyond the current capabilities? Do LLMs not know about the PaaS offerings of GCP/Azure/AWS, Heroku etc? That stuff has been IaC for quite some time now

> So what they are missing is a platform to easily deploy and maintain their projects, ... Right now it's quite tedious to set up this scaffolding...Once scaffolding like this is productized

You kind of sound like you're pretending PaaS doesn't exist. Have I misunderstood?

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