Are Software Engineers Going Away?

Every day, my timeline is flooded with the same underlying panic: Is AI going to destroy the software engineering profession? If you look at the rapid advancement of LLMs and autonomous coding agents, it’s easy to see why people are anxious. The nature of writing code is shifting but if consider where we’ve been, the current panic starts to look less like an existential end-state and more like a predictable historical loop.

Here is how I’m framing the reality of AI coding, the shift in my own relationship with programming, and how to approach the transition.

1. The Natural Evolution of Coding

I used to think the rapid rise of AI coding was a terrifying anomaly. But if you look at the history of computer science, it’s simply a continuation. We started with binary and physical punch cards. Then we abstracting that away with assembly language. Next came low-level languages like C, followed by high-level languages like Python and JavaScript.