We Will Need 10x More Software Engineers in 5 Years
AI has sparked anxiety within the software engineering community. We are nearing a world where most of the coding is done in natural language, with tools like Replit, Cursor, Windsurf, and Lovable essentially making software in a matter of minutes. The tech leaders are also not helping the cause, with their extensive debates on whether we would even need software engineers in the future. Thankfully, not all opinions are gloomy, offering the developers a little hope and relief. Claim your free Nvidia course > Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, is one of the recent voices pushing back against the doomsday narrative. In an interview with Business Insider, McKinnon called the fear of declining engineering jobs “laughable”. He compared the rise of AI to past tech shifts like personal computing and mobile, which ultimately expanded job opportunities rather than eliminating them. “In five years, there will be more software engineers than there are now,” McKinnon said, and these engineers would be building things on top of the current solutions. He also added that companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Salesforce will hire more software engineers in the near future. How Much of This is True? Obviously, not everyone agrees with this sentiment. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, speaking on Stratechery with Ben Thompson, said, “Each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while…And then at some point, maybe we will need fewer software engineers.” While he acknowledged that “agentic coding”—AI autonomously handling complex software tasks—is on the rise, he cautioned against assuming this spells the end for engineers. Altman noted that some companies are already generating over half their code through AI. However, he emphasised that human oversight remains crucial. Alarm bells really went off when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that in less than six months, AI would handle 90% of coding. This is similar to what Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho, thinks. He recently said that 90% of what programmers write today is ‘boilerplate’. But coding is just one part of the software engineering cycle. As AI grows more powerful, the engineers behind it are becoming even more valuable. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has long advocated for a broader view of software engineering. Rather than focusing solely on the tech sector, Nadella pointed to LinkedIn data that shows robust demand for engineers across healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and education. Google CEO Sundar Pichai sees the role of software engineers evolving rapidly in the face of AI. In an earlier podcast of The David Rubenstein Show: Peer to Peer Conversations, he said Google continues to prioritise “superstar engineers”—those who thrive in fast-changing environments and possess mastery in fields like AI, quantum computing, and cybersecurity. Despite hiring slowdowns, Pichai revealed that Google maintains a 90% offer acceptance rate for engineering hires. His point: demand hasn’t dropped, it’s just shifted. Engineers now need to be more versatile, more interdisciplinary, and more comfortable working with AI-powered toolchains. For Google, innovation isn’t possible without human talent at the helm. There is No Such Thing as ‘Vibe Engineering’ It remains clear that while the world is vibing to code, there is still no such thing as vibe engineering. A recent blog by Sergey Tselovalnikov highlighted that while vibe coding can accelerate prototyping, it doesn’t replace software engineering. Real engineering involves long-term system design, reliability, scalability, and maintainability—concerns that current AI-generated code cannot handle. So, despite the hype, there’s no such thing as “vibe engineering”; it’s still just engineering, with or without the code typing. Last year, the debate around AI replacing jobs was in full swing, just like today. That is when François Chollet, creator of Keras, made a prediction: “There will be more software engineers (the kind that write code, e.g. Python, C or JavaScript code) in five years than there are today.” He added that the estimated number of professional software engineers today is 26 million, which would jump to 30-35 million in five years. Being a developer or coder is not just about writing code but about engineering and thinking of higher-order things, which is where the future value of software engineering lies. “Code is largely worthless, more of a liability than an asset. Problem-solving is where the value is,” Chollet added in the thread. “If you could fully automate software engineering (my job), I think that would be great, since I could then move on to higher-leverage things. Making software is a means to an end, not the end.” In its October 2024 report, Gartner said that GenAI will spawn new roles in software engineering and operations through 2027, requiring 80% of the engineering workforce to upskill. It remains true that software engineers have to upskill faster than anyone else. Especially in India, where most IT firms and engineers are not learning to code but merely providing services, AI could be their biggest threat. If models can write code, test it, and check for self-consistency, a form of automatic supervision that is not possible in most domains due to the limits of human expertise will be ushered in. This capability would allow code to be tested empirically and automatically by AI agents. The future will be about one engineer managing a bunch of AI coding agents. As a result of this, software engineering will see a radical transformation and possibly an increase in demand. “There will be way more software engineers in the future than the present,” Russell Kaplan from Cognition Labs earlier noted. But “the job will just be very different: more English, less boilerplate coding”.
The future will be about one engineer managing a bunch of AI coding agents.
It remains clear that while the world is vibing to code, there is still no such thing as vibe engineering.
["Vibe Coding"]
["Anthropic", "GenAI", "Keras", "OpenAI", "AI", "RAG", "Python", "Vibe Coding", "Aim", "JavaScript", "R"]
["AI", "GenAI", "OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Aim", "Keras", "RAG", "Python", "R", "JavaScript"]
Mohit writes about AI in simple, explainable, and often funny words. He's especially passionate about chatting with those building AI for Bharat, with the occasional detour into AGI.