Comment by mrtksn

Only if by "solving it", you mean being able to write any program to do anything.

Software engineering is a hubris-complete problem. Somehow, being able to do so much seems to make us all assume that everyone else is capable of so little. But just because we can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, and because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things. That would be like assuming that because someone is a writer and has written 1 book, that they are fully capable of writing both War & Peace and an exhaustive manual on tractor repair.

Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers. Some people do only that, and yeah, AI can probably replace them.

"Computing" as a field only made sense when computers were new. We're going to have to go back to actually accomplishing things, not depending on the fact that computers are involved and making them do anything is hard so anyone who can make them do things is automatically valuable. (Which sucks for me, because I'm pretty good at making computers do things but not so good at much of anything else with economic value.) "What do you do?" "I use computers to do X." "Why didn't you just say you do X, then?" is already kind of a thing; now it's going to move on to "I use AI to do X."

Then again: the AI-dependent generation is losing the ability to think, as a result of leaning on AI to do it for them. So while my generation stuck the previous generation with maintaining COBOL programs, the next generation will stick mine with thinking. I can deal with that. I like thinking.

</end-of-weird-rant>

You are right, but I think at the moment, a lot of people are confusing "software engineering" with "set up my react boilerplate with tailwind and unit tests", and AI just is way better for that sort of rote thing.

I've never felt comfortable with the devs who just want some Jira ticket with exactly what to do. That's basically what AI/LLMs can do pretty well.

I have a nasty suspicion that far fewer of them will be, that CS and SE based professions will end up collapsing and consolidating into a handful of AI megacorporations and a guild-like elite of AI-herders will be what's left.

That's an interesting paradox of the current AI: useful enough to make the industry less competent (either directly by helping students to not learn or indirectly by replacing people in entry level formative jobs) while not being smart enough to replace all the chain to the top

> Highly skilled people of next generation will do fine.

I would bet for the opposite. In a huge rush to optimization and job elimination, early career people suffer the most. However it also makes it impossible to switch careers, start from scratch, and etc.

In my experience, many highly experienced professionals are already below average. That's not to say they don't work hard, but if their solutions are on par or worse than what an LLM can produce, then they might see themselves out of a job if the LLM can work harder.

As another commenter said, we'll likely see a big change on the junior end, which will affect the more experienced hire pool as time goes on.

Not sure what the point is here because highly skilled seamstress is still a well-paying job, and all the mass-produced clothes are also still sewn by hand.