> The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development that will significantly reduce the need for engineers is really weak Well,

> The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development that will significantly reduce the need for engineers is really weak Well, there hasn't been one single major breakthrough but rather a lot of small ones that cumulatively mean that software has become easier to write. Most of it is more mundane than new fundamental abstractions, it's more about distributed version control, better bug trackers, better libraries, more accessible documentation and learning materials, and so on. These things allow software to be written more quickly with smaller teams. Even someone writing in a language like C that hasn't changed much in decades will have a far easier time of it in 2020 than it 2000, simply because of the existence of StackOverflow and the progress that has been made in getting compilers to warn about unsafe code. This is combined with the fact that as more software is written, less software needs to be created to fill some functionality gap. As long as we have computers and people who care to use them, there will always need to be new software written. Most software that people get paid to write is not written for fun or for intellectual exercise, though, it's written to solve a business need. If that business need can be satisfied with existing software, there's less motivation for a businesses to write their own.