A software engineer’s fear of AI systems taking their job away

In a private Facebook group, a software developer expressed fear about losing their job to AI systems that can write code. As a software engineer who has been thinking about this for a while, I posted a reply to that post. I am so proud of that reply that I am persisting a copy of it here (with some minor edits). 🙂

Go back a few decades. When people moved from assembly language to high level languages, there could have been a similar fear. (I don’t know if there really was, but I think we can draw a parallel.)

You suddenly didn’t have to painstakingly write optimised assembly code and manually link different assembly modules. Compilers and linkers were “good enough.” Tasks that needed three human programmers now only needed one. Experts in different machine architectures were not needed anymore; any high-level-language code can be compiled to run on any architecture.

If you were an assembly programmer, you were right to be terrified of losing your job to compilers. But then, if you just learnt how to code in a high level language, you became a lot more productive. You just had to look beyond machine architectures and see where you could add real value.

I don’t pretend to know how many software engineers will lose their jobs to the new AI systems. But I am fairly confident that today’s programmers will have an easier time adapting to the new world than a non-programmer learning to vibe-code today.

It’s entirely in your control whether you stick to the “old ways” or adapt to the new paradigm. Are you doing something to stay relevant? Ask yourself that, and keep adapting and improving until you have a satisfactory answer.