An opinion piece arguing that AI will not only replace software engineers but eventually all skilled trades, including plumbing, and that CS students should focus on problem-solving skills rather than fearing automation.
From RobotFuture: Well, that's what the AI doomsayers keep saying about Software Engineers right now. AI is coming for our jobs, so apparently the smart move was to become a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter—anything “real” involving pipes, wires, ladders, and a truck. I get the joke. I have probably made it. I just do not buy the argument. A lot of the panic comes from watching someone “vibe code” an app in ten minutes. They post a localhost screenshot, maybe a short demo, and everyone acts like software engineering has been solved. Production software has users, security problems, old dependencies, unclear requirements, bad data, unexpected traffic, and years of accumulated decisions. Building it requires judgment: understanding what matters, choosing the right tradeoffs, finding strange failures, and taking responsibility when something breaks. Plumbers are going too If an AI rises that eliminates the need for software engineers, it eliminates the need for plumbers too. Software engineering is about solving hard problems. Code is simply the medium. Engineers take incomplete information, reason through constraints, design systems, test ideas, diagnose failures, and adapt when reality refuses to match the plan. An AI that can do all of that better than human engineers has become a general problem solver. Giving it a robot body, designing specialized machines, or coordinating automated physical work becomes another engineering problem for it to solve. Pipes are awkward, houses are weird, and every basement is its own nightmare. Those details make plumbing difficult for today's robots, but they do not protect plumbing from an intelligence capable of replacing the people who design robots, train their control systems, improve their hardware, and solve the failures they encounter. I am not saying that intelligence is around the corner. The hypothetical simply makes no sense halfway. Becoming a plumber is a career choice, not an escape hatch from superhuman intelligence. AI should make the problems bigger I expect AI to raise the baseline and unlock harder problems. Engineers may spend less time fighting build systems, wiring APIs together, and clicking through dashboards. Small teams may become capable of tackling better medicine, better energy, useful robotics, and tools they could never afford to build before. Maybe we start asking bigger questions again: How do we get to Mars? How do we get to Saturn? How do we leave the solar system? Why is nobody out there answering our calls? I want a future where the boring work gets compressed, our capabilities grow, and the problems worth solving get bigger. A note to CS students If you are studying computer science right now, your degree will still be valuable in ten or twenty years. Focus on the durable skills. Learn how computers work and how systems fail. Practice breaking vague problems into smaller ones, testing assumptions, finding the real constraint, and continuing when the first five approaches fail. Learn problem-solving Languages, frameworks, and tools will change. Clear reasoning, fast learning, and sound technical judgment will compound for your entire career. Use AI and get good at it. Let it make you faster while you keep building your own understanding. A generated todo app does not erase the need for highly skilled engineers; it shows that the floor is rising. If AI keeps making engineers faster, we will take on more ambitious work. If it eventually performs the whole job, every other industry will face the same pressure—including the plumbers.
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor argue that AI will not replace software engineers, citing bottlenecks like deciding what to build, verification, and deep human understanding as key to the profession's resilience against automation.
This essay argues that AI will not replace software engineers because the 'decide' and 'deliver' layers of knowledge work resist automation, and evidence from recent layoffs at Block and Snap shows that CEOs often overestimate AI's capabilities.
A software engineer reflects on how AI will affect the profession, proposing two categories of developers and arguing that the role will adapt rather than disappear.
The author argues that relying on AI for coding may lead to long-term skill atrophy, potentially transforming software engineering from a lifelong career into a shorter-lived profession similar to professional athletics.
An opinion piece argues that AI has not taken meaningful jobs but rather exposed the pointlessness of many knowledge-worker roles, while hands-on jobs like nursing and plumbing remain AI-proof.