Will AI replace software engineers

Most of the founders I meet as my clients. "Oh, we have the product ready, most of the work is done, just a few tweaks required. We just need a tech person to connect a few dots, review the code, and resolve performance issues." And then the endless discussion where I have to explain, it's a lot more than what you think, "Review the code".

Hot take here, in the world of AI, code quality, outside of things that cause legitimate issues such as performance hits (which should be caught by testing as mentioned below), doesn't really matter that much. You don't need to read every single line the AI spits out and ensure it fits your coding standards precisely; those were for people, and people don't really write code anymore.

What matters now is the quality of your specifications, meaning what AND how you are telling the AI it should perform a task, and the quality of your tests. Before you start coding with AI you should know exactly what you are making, exactly how you are making it, and have a complete set of tests that confirm you got what you wanted and it works as you want.

Code has always been an abstraction to allow humans to understand better the instructions they are giving the computer. Being able to write in English (or your language of choice) is just the ultimate abstraction, ideally we'll reach a point where programming languages don't really exist and our natural language is just compiled into functional instructions. So stop worrying about code quality and worry about the things that matter, how you plan your work, specify your instructions and confirm the result performs as it should.

Just one case scenario, I saw a LinkedIn post indicating that a student woke up to a $55,000 Google Cloud bill. He pushed his Google Gemini API key to GitHub by accident. He thought the repo was private and didn’t check his email for three months.

Google refused to cancel the charge.

No AI tool would have saved him from this. Only experience would. Engineering is more than writing code.

• You need to protect API keys.
• You need to set billing limits.
• You need to watch usage.
• You need to read logs and alerts.
• These are real skills.

Software development comes from practice and from making painful mistakes. Not from blindly prompting an AI. So no, AI will not replace software engineers anytime soon. But obviously, it can increase their productivity 10x.

That’s why AI will not replace software engineers.