💻 Why AI Won't Replace Developers

Focusing on AI replacing software engineering jobs is like focusing on the fact that a flood in your city will damage your house while ignoring the effect on the city as a whole.

If you extrapolate AI's capability to do software engineering such that in N years it's on-par with a human, then you should realize that by that point it can also do any other knowledge work (and beyond). This includes work like leading a business or being a politician.

It’s not like AI will replace only software engineers while remaining incapable in all other use cases.

If AI becomes that able to entirely fill the role of a software engineer of today, the world as we know it will be quite different and it's inconsequential to worry about the fate of dev jobs in particular.

The job as a concept will change at that point and we're all affected.

The only conversation we should really be having is what happens when AI is as smart as us.

Plus, I'd argue that software skills will be even more in-demand in the world with human level AI because it's not like we'd let AI work without any supervision or collaboration from us.

And to be able to productively supervise and collaborate with an AI that can code, you also need to know how to code.

There will be more SWE jobs in the next decade than all decades that came before.

A single coder with AI is N times more productive, and the barrier to entry to software development becomes lower.

Thousands of new people can now become builders, and the existing builders can build even faster.

Innovation throughput goes through the roof.

We get more startups than ever before, more products created and continually improved, and global prosperity increases.

There’s never been a better time to learn to code.