> Is it that much a stretch to say that in the near future (15-25 years), AI might take over a significant part of software engineering? Not much of a stretch

> Is it that much a stretch to say that in the near future (15-25 years), AI might take over a significant part of software engineering? Not much of a stretch at all. But we've seen this sort of transition before: lower-level languages (microcode, assembly) are now largely generated by other software yet the amount of software development work needing to be done by humans has only expanded, and I don't expect there to be much more than a bump in the road in terms of demand for software developers this time around either. Though I will say that the bump will be larger than the non-event that 4GLs turned out to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_... The most disruptive scenario I can imagine will result in a slew of businesses hit with absolutely massive cloud computing bills (due to naive generated code that works, but very inefficiently, or perhaps just code running for naively specified tasks that HAVE no efficient solution as stated), leading to a standard requirement of having an expensive human software developer sign off on it before deployment like architects signing off on blueprints (which might be the thin edge of the wedge for professional licensing, but that's a different conversation). As a secondary effect, there might also be a proliferation of new (or newly popular) languages (for which insufficient public code exists for ML systems to learn from), as developers focus on domain+skill+technology combinations that haven't been automated YET.