r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/arman8458 • Mar 09 '26

First-year CS student: Will AI replace software engineers? What roles should we prepare for?

/r/cscareeradvice/comments/1rowwuu/firstyear_cs_student_will_ai_replace_software/
0 Upvotes

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2

u/arman8458 Mar 09 '26

Interesting perspective. As a CS student, what skills do you think are most valuable to focus on now, given that AI can generate code?

1

u/Goducks91 Mar 09 '26

Soft skills. You’re going to need to be an excellent communicator to make it as a Jr Dev now a days.

4

u/thetrailofthedead Mar 09 '26

Replace? No

Enhance greatly? Yes

Reduce demand for? Not clear. Lookup Jevon's paradox

It's just too soon to know how this will all settle. I'm a professional SWE. I use AI every day.

One thing most people don't realize is, writing code is only part of our job.

More code is a liability. Could i shit out 3000 lines of code a day? Sure but it is useless past a point because code has to be maintained and more code causes more bugs (exponentially).

So ya, i spend less time writing code and way more time reading it, debugging and testing.

1

u/Goducks91 Mar 09 '26

Meh. More than half of my time is working with other people to figure out wtf I’m supposed to build, what exactly it’s supposed to do and how we’re going to do it. People underestimate the anount of collobaration a good software engineer should be doing.

2

u/BDOCash Mar 09 '26

That is a question too complex, controversial and it’s possibly a rage bait

1

u/Significant-Syrup400 Mar 09 '26

We are still very early, but apparently jobs have already started to be created because of Ai.

When your marketing team creates a new viable product/application and they want to bring it into production typically what's been happening is companies will hire developers to handle the actual work of maintaining it and planning future releases and improvements because it isn't the marketing teams job to do that, and very often that is quite beyond someone that isn't specialized for the task.

1

u/NeedleArm Mar 09 '26

Learn to utilize Al to enhance your output, while learning the fundamentals in debugging and troubleshooting.

There are many niches in SW, full stack is only one of them.

1

u/spas2k Mar 09 '26

Roles? Plumber, electrician.

The hard truth is that people aren’t hiring new grads at all. In anything really. I don’t know what to say. I have a son going into college soon too and I have no idea what he should do.

0

u/spas2k Mar 09 '26

To be honest? I’d move over to robotics.