I don't think anyone in tech is expecting AI to replace engineers altogether, particularly for spec work. That said, engineers on the low end of the skill spectrum are often quite bad at pushing back on specs and just code the tickets put in front of them.
From the perspective of the business the way I interact with AI is similar to the way I interact with junior engineers - I hand them tickets, they hand me code that I cannot trust, and I verify it (this leaves out mentoring and other soft stuff, but the business only cares a little about that). However the AI has a turnaround time of seconds.
Now this isn't a perfect 1:1, AI struggles with large amounts of context in a way humans handle better, but I can think of a lot of work done in my company that could be handed off to an AI capable of writing 10,000 loc programs...
Comments
I don't think anyone in tech is expecting AI to replace engineers altogether, particularly for spec work. That said, engineers on the low end of the skill spectrum are often quite bad at pushing back on specs and just code the tickets put in front of them.
From the perspective of the business the way I interact with AI is similar to the way I interact with junior engineers - I hand them tickets, they hand me code that I cannot trust, and I verify it (this leaves out mentoring and other soft stuff, but the business only cares a little about that). However the AI has a turnaround time of seconds.
Now this isn't a perfect 1:1, AI struggles with large amounts of context in a way humans handle better, but I can think of a lot of work done in my company that could be handed off to an AI capable of writing 10,000 loc programs...