I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
Short summary
A staff engineer argues that AI coding tools are improving fast enough to make most software engineering jobs obsolete within a decade, and that past predictions of industry doom don't apply because those technologies never actually replaced programmers while AI likely will.
- AI agents are already better than many engineers at code maintenance and debugging, not just writing new code, which undermines the argument that humans will always be needed to clean up AI-generated code.
- Junior and mid-level engineers will face job losses first; senior staff engineers supervising AI agents may survive longer, but this represents a massive contraction in total engineering headcount, not job security.
- The Jevons effect (increased demand offsetting productivity gains) probably won't save the industry because AI can handle both code creation and maintenance equally well, unlike past automation waves that only eliminated specific tasks.
Full summary
Sean Goedecke, a staff engineer, argues that software engineering as a profession faces existential threat from AI within the next decade. He's not hedging—he thinks the industry might not survive another ten years in its current form, and if it does, it'll be unrecognizable. His concern stems from the irony that programmers built their lucrative careers on automating other jobs, and now AI is automating programming itself. He acknowledges he's probably safer than junior and mid-level engineers since his work already resembles supervising AI agents, but that's only a temporary reprieve. Companies will eventually realize they can rent Claude instances for a fraction of what they pay engineers.
The real question, Goedecke argues, is whether tech companies will undershoot or overshoot AI capabilities. If they undershoot and keep hiring engineers longer than necessary, his job transforms into code review and managing AI outputs—less engineering, more supervision. If they overshoot and lay off too many people, there might be a temporary shortage of experienced engineers to manage the AI-generated mess, which could buy senior engineers time. But he dismisses the Jevons effect argument (that total software demand will explode and offset job losses) because AI handles both writing and maintaining code. His own experience testing AI tools shows them improving from "hopeless" to "usually faster than me and sometimes more insightful" in just one year. He sees no fundamental capability gap AI needs to close—just incremental improvements to what it already does.
Goedecke isn't entirely pessimistic about his own prospects, partly because he's in a better position than most peers and partly because he got to enjoy the good times while they lasted. But he's clear-eyed about the math: if AI keeps improving at its current pace and companies can automate the work cheaper than hiring, demand for software engineers will shrink, not grow. He hopes he's wrong, that some essential human element will remain irreplaceable, but he's not betting on it.