Sometimes I think about what I would do as a software engineer if AI could do my job.
Every few weeks there is a new AI coding tool that produces better and better code. Right now we are at a stage that is well below junior level coding. Too many bugs, security holes, and hallucinations are produced by those statistical text generators we call "LLM". They are basically unusable for more than the simplest tasks.
But for how long? Five years? A decade? Twenty years? Who knows?
And I don't know what the best career path in software engineering would be with that outlook. But I am pretty sure about one thing: In the short term, say 2-5 years, we're going to need a lot more security engineers to fix all the problems caused by inferior "AI" assistants. So maybe that's a possible career path as a software engineer, with more leeway before AI takes over completely.
Maybe we still have time to learn something else. Maybe farming, woodworking, or a trade.
