I'm not worried about programs like Copilot, in the same way that I'm not worried about outsourcing. If price was the sole factor in software engineering then a

I'm not worried about programs like Copilot, in the same way that I'm not worried about outsourcing. If price was the sole factor in software engineering then all jobs would have already been shipped overseas. Instead, an awful lot of companies tried that, and realized that it's far from the bees knees. AI tools like this will be force multipliers, the same way that IDEs are. SWEs 20 years ago decried the rise of the IDE the same way that some are moaning about this. "It'll lead to a generation of know-nothing programmers." Instead, SWEs are more productive today than they ever have been before. Software engineers should welcome the day that an AI makes it possible to describe what you want instead of telling the machine exactly what to do. That's where I see this technology going in 20 years. That said, it will likely never be good enough to replace an engineer completely because the value of an engineer is in deciding what to build and how to build it. Not in determining exactly which lines of code to write. SWE will be more enjoyable as a field in 20 years because we won't have to wrangle compilers, or deal with fundamental limitations of how computers express ideas versus how humans express concepts. Instead, we'll let the AI translate for us and deal with all those problems automatically. In the short term, I see lots of potential for this technology to make something like the ultimate cross-compiler. If you can take someone's code, convert it to some kind of universal representation (embedding), and then convert that to another language (and get working code that verifiably produces the same results) you would make a ton of money.