The past 12 months have seen remarkable advances in AI coding capabilities. To offer some perspective, there’s a benchmark that measures performance on 500 real-world engineering problems derived from real world software projects. Early last year, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) solved only about 4% of these issues. With this momentum in AI coding agents now drawing significant media attention, I’m asked more frequently: “Will this affect software engineering jobs?”
The tipping point in writing this article was a conversation with a prospective investor who wondered whether his child should continue pursuing an interest in computer science. In true engineering style, I’ll begin with a succinct “TL;DR” (too long; didn’t read) summary and then elaborate in detail below:
