What's one common challenge software engineers face, no matter what kind of tech company they work for?

But the fact is that the skillset and the tasks of the software engineer (no matter who they work for) are going to change almost completely. And so all engineers think (or should think) about how to stay employable in the near term.

Casual observers don’t realize just how fast this evolution is happening. Mind you, all of these milestones sounded like complete science fiction to someone not working in that field hearing them 6 months ago. The question of software engineers being replaced by AI is no longer an if, it’s a when.

Same observations for tools released in the last year, such as AI-centric IDEs like cursor or windsurf and the advent of “vibe-coding”. This gives developers more capacities but doesn’t completely redefine what it is that they do.

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2.5 years ago, chatGPT was released and the same conversation resurfaced. Now you had a tool with whom you could simulate technical conversations up to generating code, and you could use the various models released along chatGPT (and competitors) to perform tasks. This has made some tasks which were up to now difficult and labor intensive, much easier, but it has extended the capacity of the software engineer more than again, transform the nature of their job.

3.5 years ago, github copilot was made available publicly. Tons of people commented that AI was going to replace human developers. Github Copilot (and competitors) had a significant impact on the developer experience but didn’t really change the nature of the job.

Their job being replaced by AI.

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Of course there is nuance to that, and arguably the advent of AI centric way of creating applications will require a lot of new human workers, and the role of software engineer is going to undergo a radical transformation more than be completely eliminated.

The latest development is asynchronous coding agents like Codex or Jules. Now you can give simple tasks to an agent and it will take them to completion. Agents, by the way, are no longer limited to writing code, they also do tasks within the scope of what human engineers do.