There appears to be growing consensus that AI will change the nature of software engineering forever.
Tom Blomfield, a Y Combinator Group Partner and co-founder of successful fintech company Monzo Bank, has offered a provocative outlook on the future of software development roles. He suggests not an outright elimination of these roles, but a fundamental transformation driven by rapidly advancing AI capabilities.
“Software engineering jobs of today, I think, will not exist in five or ten years,” Blomfield said. “I think there will be demand for smart people who know how to wrangle these AI coding machines, and if we want to call those people software engineers, so be it. But I think the job is dramatically, dramatically different.”
“I think what’s interesting here, people have strong reactions when they think, ‘Oh, the job that I do or my friends do might go away.’ It’s a very scary proposition,” said fellow Y Combinator Partner David Lieb. “But if you look backwards at history, the first computer programmers that existed, they didn’t do a job that was anywhere like today’s software engineers, right? They were writing machine code, they were making punch cards.”
He continued, explaining the progression: “Then we abstracted, we built better tools that abstracted the work away from the machine level, and we got used to those tools – object-oriented programming languages, all these other tooling around the writing code.”
Bringing it to the present AI revolution, Lieb concluded, “And you could argue that this new way of AI is just another abstraction that allows the human to be a higher-level agent rather than the person actually writing the code.”
AI has already begun impacting how coding works, even at top companies. Google and Microsoft have indicated that 30 percent of their code is now being written by AI, while Meta has said that most of its code towards AI research could be written by AI in a few years. Thesee implications point towards a significant redefinition of the software engineer’s role. If AI can handle the bulk of routine code generation, the human engineer’s value shifts towards tasks that require deeper understanding, critical thinking, and strategic oversight. The “AI wranglers” Blomfield envisions would likely focus on high-level system architecture, prompt engineering to guide AI tools effectively, testing and validation of AI-generated code, and integrating disparate AI-produced components into a cohesive whole. Skills in problem decomposition, defining requirements and maintaining oversight of increasingly complex, AI-assisted systems will become paramount. This mirrors past technological leaps where automation didn’t eliminate human involvement but rather elevated it, allowing professionals to focus on more strategic and less tedious aspects of their work.