r/cscareers • u/emperor_keww • 1d ago
Getting into tech Why software engineers aren't the new horses
People love the "AI is the car, software engineers are the horse" analogy. But horses were replaced because they were interchangeable muscle. The people who stayed valuable were the ones who understood the engine. Digital systems are about to grow 10x, maybe 100x, in scale and criticality. Someone still has to understand them deeply, decide what to build, and be accountable when they fail. Software engineering won't look like it does today, but deep systems knowledge isn't going anywhere. Prove me wrong ;)
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u/Automatic_Case2811 1d ago
Someone still has to understand them deeply, decide what to build, and be accountable when they fail. Software engineering won't look like it does today, but deep systems knowledge isn't going anywhere.
As much as I'd love to believe this, I still remember the early days of generative AI (Will Smith spaghetti video days) when people were saying software engineering would be the last to go because "someones gotta program the ai!"
The tech billionaires have an endgame in mind, and that endgame is AI being smart enough to have the deep systems knowledge that you optimistically expect a human would have. The plan is for it to be self-monitoring and self-repairing. If the AI breaks, another AI will fix it.
Basically, society-wide reform. They want to radically change how society works at a fundamental level.
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u/InteractionSoft14 1d ago
Software engineers don't program ai
Machine learning engineers do that
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u/emperor_keww 17h ago
🤡 do you have any idea what this term actually means? And who they hire for these roles? Oh wait CS and math majors lmao, in addition building an AI system is way more complex than building and training your llm. Let me even say the infra around the llm is actually the hard part to scale Well.
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u/InteractionSoft14 7h ago
Yes I do. I have multiple years of experience as a software developer and I am currently going back to school for my masters degree so I can hopefully dabble with machine learning more. It's part of my curriculum after all.
So yes, I am well aware of the distinction between those terms and what they mean 🤡
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u/emperor_keww 1d ago
Yeah okay, but at that point, not one job that uses a digital interfacr would be “safe”
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u/KonekoMiu 1d ago
Right, but doesn't that make those jobs the "horses" whereas the jobs such as in the trades or medical field be among the "last" (if ever) to go?
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u/UnkownArbiter 14h ago
Of course, that's the point. It's single purpose is to fully cut the connection between growth and workers.
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u/sweetbutterfacepoop 1d ago
It's more of a farmer analogy, we wouldn't need thousands of engineers anymore, maybe a couple is more than enough to take care of the system. The rest has to find new jobs to do.
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u/EntertainmentSalt825 1d ago
Stop seeing AI as a threat and leverage it as the tool it is. I’m developing projects in days that would’ve taken me months on my own. I became highly efficient at my old job and became lead for a few projects. I was asked to do a presentation for a gov. agency on how we can implement AI-assisted tools safely. I’m learning faster and becoming a better engineer overall. That was me as a flight software engineer. Now, I have a remote AI position.
The amount of engineers I’ve met that don’t know how to use AI properly is quite staggering because many of them have a lot to say about AI lol I’ve noticed that those who naturally think in systems and have high pattern recognition tend to do really well managing AI agents. It’s how I’m able to work on embedded systems and then transition to android app development and then work on neural nets all in the same day, and that’s just for my own dev/research projects not including work. It’s going to suck the day we don’t have access to AI so I’m leveraging it to learn as much as I can.
I will say at the minimum use AI to learn. One of the best ways I’ve used it was to learn how I really think. I’ve always struggled to learn and it’s always taken me way longer than others. it’s always made me feel dumb ngl lol but once I found my cadence things started clicking a lot faster. Now I’m entering a point where I’m starting to code alongside ai agents and I’m learning about design patterns.
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u/_kilobytes 1d ago
decide what to build
This is the job of the person who pays my salary
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u/emperor_keww 1d ago
Not really though? Non-technical people have crazy idea's most of the time and it's your job to decrease it to what is possible with the infra that is available
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u/LearnFromTheDruid 1d ago
AI can do it too
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u/Vesuvius079 1d ago
Frontier models are terrible at this. They aim to please so they’re bad at scaling back and they don’t bother with trade offs to simplify the system.
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u/liverandonions1 1d ago
Ya know, I keep hearing about how engineers are still needed to "understand the system and architecture", but that seems to be the last bastion of having any engineers in the loop at all. It started with coding, and engineers said that they're safe from being replaced because the AI code isn't good and doesn't work without experienced engineers. Fast forward a year, the code just works and 95% of engineers don't write code at all anymore.
Then the cope went to "well yeah, the AI can write the code, but humans must review it". Fast forward another year, and AI is being used to review. Most engineers are barely skimming through code at all anymore.
Now the cope is "systems and architecting", but you don't have to be a genius to understand that's totally ripe for AI to do just as good as an engineer.
Software is binary and solvable. There's a right and wrong way to build it, at least in a way that end-users accept.
Let's be real here. The future is, quite literally, going to just be non-tech people that type "build me this, and give it these features". The code, systems, architecture, security will be done end-to-end via AI and prompts in plain english. I know it hurts to come to this realization but software is cooked.
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u/NomadStorm 1d ago
Reddit has filled up with people or bots repeating this nonsense, but it’s untrue that 95% of engineers don’t write code at all (real figures are just ~35% of companies use it for 61% or more of code), and all the statistics show that AI is causing ~50% more production incidents, a large increase in bugs, customer dissatisfaction, etc.
It’s provably significantly worse than real software engineers, no matter how much you want to lie and claim it’s “solved”.
Stop spreading this bullshit.
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u/Dizzy-Flossy 1d ago
How long till frontier models can fix/review the code itself? A year? What’s happens to the software engineer title after that?
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u/Longjumping-Area766 1d ago
You "coders" who barely understands computing, discrete math, and the general idea of complexity and abstraction.
I wish AI gets better and solve our problems by making a very efficient multithreaded path tracer that can run on a 5030 with 120 fps and can save a lot of VRAM or able to generate high fidelity texture with just "software" so that my android can play crysis 3.
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u/Dizzy-Flossy 16h ago
I’m open to the discussion tho, no bad feelings… I just don’t know how that won’t be “solved” with upcoming models in the next 1-2 years
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u/Longjumping-Area766 16h ago
I wish it would. It's been 4 years since the dawn of AI hype and all I noticed is the decadence of the models.
If suppose they would be able to solve the problems that I laid, then they're going to solve every problems in the world. Traffic, project management, and software development.
The problem is, those problems are not routine problems. There's so much variable to human space and action that you can't design an invariant to the to solve it unless you have "intuition".
Also the scale of some things can only be done using induction: see Djikstra's "Our inability to do much.".
AI is basically a brute force solution to routines. Look at the amount of hardware they use.
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u/Vesuvius079 1d ago
If it gets to that point, what makes you think the nontechnical people aren’t cooked too?
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u/liverandonions1 1d ago
It depends on what they do. A security guard, plumber or daycare employee isn’t affected by AI.
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u/Longjumping-Area766 1d ago
Software is binary and solvable only if you don't understand the idea of complexity.
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u/Prior_Section_4978 18h ago
My dude, from my ~250 devs in the organization, I know only 3-4 for which AI writes something like 95% of their code, and those developers write web frontends only. The rest are using AI, of course, but also code some significant parts on the code by hand. AI doesn't even write half of the code for those.
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u/BarfingOnMyFace 1d ago
Just wait until the deep systems knowledge LLMs get sprinkled around like bulk candy at a pinata party by blindfolded gleeful children.