Here is my take on, AI is coming for the engineering and programming roles: I’ve read many posting about how AI is coming for programmers/ software engineering jobs, to a degree it will. However AI itself will not be replacing junior, senior, nor principal engineering roles in the foreseeable future.

The reason I say this, if you sat down in front of ChatGPT today with no former background in this field and needed to build a custom app or enterprise level software, what would you ask it? I challenge those who think AI is going to replace most engineers to give it a try.

1. AI has to have prompts, without any former understanding of engineering you will have zero idea of what prompts to give, and how to expand upon that given output from AI, to get past the mere boiler plate that was spit out by AI.
2. Even when AI does begin to take on more junior level roles, there will be a senior engineer prompting it, hence the need for engineers and experienced programmers.
3. How do you think AI is progressing? It’s by the abilities and work of engineers, programmers, and architects in the artificial intelligence arena.
4. By the small chance that AI is at some point is able to some how self prompt itself and build full scale web and software applications, then set those apps up in the cloud, monitor it, support it in production, scale it as needed, and then add new features based on input from product owners and project managers… then at which point many businesses will not be able to afford this type of AI technology, the same way many small businesses can’t afford enterprise level applications now. Not all larger businesses will be able to afford it, there will for the foreseeable future always be a need for a software engineer and programmer.

Even if this miraculous jump mentioned above for AI occurred there will still be a gap for an engineer to fill and bridge.Don’t give up on your craft, keep reaching for the next level, and don’t let these people who have zero experience in your field say other wise, most of the people believing this have no idea the scale of modern technology, the many different roles and moving pieces that there are in the modern application from development, QA, to production and supporting operations once in production. Will AI have a major impact sure, over all it will enhance how fast we are able to move the pieces around, via engineers and architects leveraging AI in there day to day efforts.