Yes, precisely.
People can choose to stop practicing it. Like they choose to not learn cursive or shorthand and they choose to stop reading long form books and essays. If people stop practicing software engineering then yes, it will disappear.
AI won’t replace it. It’s not human. It doesn’t think, feel, reason, care about, have thoughts or visions of the future. It doesn’t wake up in the morning or dream at night. It doesn’t get inspired. It doesn’t talk with other people and collaborate and share stories with them in the evenings about the struggles they’ve had working on a hard problem.
It’s an algorithm that runs on a machine that performs query analysis and inference on a model.
It can’t tell you what you want, that your specification is wrong, that you’re better off choosing a different avenue.
It doesn’t enrich your own knowledge and practice using it.
Sure, it can be used to generate lots of code. We can tweak the harnesses and parameters to optimize it to solve many classes of problems. But what do you think engineering is?
I don’t think AI is going to replace people. People are going to choose to do that. And some of use are going to believe them. Some of us aren’t.
A quote attributed to Pablo Picasso expresses it well: “What good are computers? They can only give you answers.”
> It can’t tell you what you want, that your specification is wrong, that you’re better off choosing a different avenue.
I’m sorry, but I’m baffled by this? I’ve had plenty of times where I’ve had an agent check a spec or propose alternatives. And for that matter, I also read novels now on recommendation of an LLM using my existing favorite books, that’s pretty explicitly telling me what I want.