Claiming that yesterday’s senior engineers will become tomorrow’s juniors because of AI completely misses what software engineering actually is. It is the classic mistake of confusing tool hype with real engineering expertise.
The argument that horse carriage makers were mad when cars showed up sounds witty, but it exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of technological revolutions.
A few grounding points on where we actually stand:
- Revolutions replace isolated tasks, not complex professions
Each technological shift only automates specific, repetitive routines rather than replacing an entire high-level discipline overnight. Right now, LLMs act as advanced, interactive reference manuals that ease cognitive routines without taking ownership of end-to-end architecture or edge cases. - Plausibility is not correctness
Even AI providers openly state that these models generate statistically plausible outputs with zero guarantee of factual or logical truth. In software engineering, code that merely looks plausible is often far more dangerous than code that fails immediately, because subtle hallucinations and invalid assumptions compound silently in production.