Software engineering will undoubtedly change in the AI era, but the human could still be at the center of things.
Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and CEO of Affirm, has a distinctive take on where the software engineer fits into a world increasingly shaped by AI. Unlike many tech leaders who frame the debate in terms of replacement, Levchin argues that software engineering is too layered a discipline — part science, part art, part craft — for large language models to simply take over. And because of that, the human engineer’s role won’t disappear; it will evolve.
“Software engineering is an interesting combination. I’m obviously biased, but it’s a science — computer science is a science. It’s also an art form. If you read code — or maybe we used to read code for fun — some code is more elegant than others, and you would readily see it. That’s a beautifully written piece of software. That’s garbage, but it does the job. And so there’s a matter of taste and elegance in programming.”
Levchin goes further, arguing that software engineering is also a craft in the more traditional sense. “When you actually look at well-made, production-grade code, it’s like a thing that someone could stamp their brand on — whatever the term a craftsman of yesteryear would use for this.”
It is precisely because software engineering sits at this intersection of science, art, and craft that Levchin believes AI won’t simply take over. “Because it’s such a combination of these three things, I don’t think LLMs are going to naturally always deliver beautifully crafted, elegant, yet scientifically correct code. And so you’ll still need some degree of taste — even so much as to converse with the LLM and steer it towards the right outcome. And for that, you have to understand what you’re doing.”
This is where Levchin introduces his most striking idea: the software engineer of the future as a sculptor. “We may not spend a lot of time — maybe soon enough, we’ll spend zero time — learning the exact minutiae of syntactic decisions of each programming language. But the conversation with the machine around what you, as a software sculptor, would consider to be elegant — I think will remain.”
He is unambiguous about why that matters: “That’s certainly important to me as a programmer. And I think without having a solid foundation in computer science, I wouldn’t be able to have that conversation.”
Levchin’s framing cuts against a wave of much more alarming predictions from across the industry. Salesforce had said it won’t hire any software engineers last year, with CEO Marc Benioff citing AI productivity gains of 30 to 50 percent. Google’s Sundar Pichai has confirmed that well over 30 percent of code at the company is now written by AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has gone further still, predicting that the vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI systems within a year.
Even voices focused on transformation rather than replacement acknowledge the scale of the shift. Y Combinator’s Tom Blomfield has argued that software engineering jobs of today will not exist in their current form within five to ten years — though he adds that there will still be demand for people who know how to work with AI coding tools effectively.
What Levchin offers is a more precise articulation of what that human value actually looks like. It isn’t just prompt engineering or oversight — it’s aesthetic judgment, architectural sensibility, and a deep enough foundation in computer science to hold a meaningful conversation with the machine. The syntax may become the machine’s domain, but the vision — what good software feels like — stays human. In that sense, the software sculptor isn’t a lesser version of today’s engineer. It may well be a more demanding one.