Will AI Replace Software Engineers?

No. At least according to Josh Comeau in an excellent blog post titled “The End of Front-End Development”. Josh says, “Certain tasks might be delegated to an AI, but not many jobs.”

It is very easy to look at all the recent developments in artificial intelligence and worry that robots are coming to take over our jobs. Especially when AI chat can get really dark.

However, for many software engineers change is the name of the game. Nearly 10 years ago, at the beginning of my career, I was working on an Angular 1 application. Since then there have been many JavaScript frameworks come and go. This may just be another change for us to adapt to.

A meme of Gru, from Despicable Me, details his plans for building an AI to replace him.

Josh comes to this conclusion in his post:

What would happen if developers suddenly became 2x more productive? More bugs would be fixed, more features would be shipped, more profit would be made. There’s no shortage of stuff to build, and so it’s not like we’d run out of work for the devs to do.

Some of the most successful software engineers in this new era of AI may just be the ones that incorporate AI into their existing skill set. We may see a complete transformation of our jobs, or entirely new jobs emerge.

A meme of Woody and Buzz that says, 'AI, AI Everywhere'

Robots won’t take over our jobs any time soon, because:

There’s something special about being a human that we can’t even put words, let alone replicate on a silicon chip. … AI will be extremely good at mimicking humans but will never surpass human intellect because, at the end of the day, it’s just based on all the garbage content we put on the internet for the last 30 years.

Source

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Further Reading/Listening