I have been thinking about this for a while and I genuinely believe it the software engineering profession is heading in the exact same direction medicine went decades ago. Fewer people. Harder to enter. But far more respected.
Right now AI is quietly swallowing the kind of work that kept thousands of junior developers employed. The repetitive stuff. The boilerplate. The “just build me a form that submits to an API” tickets. That work is not coming back. Not because companies are being cruel but because a tool that costs almost nothing can now do it in seconds.
And I know that sounds scary. But stay with me.
Think about how medicine works. You do not graduate from medical school and immediately operate on someone. You spend years working beside experienced doctors watching, assisting, making small decisions under supervision, slowly building the kind of judgment that only comes from real situations. The knowledge is not the hard part. The judgment is. And judgment cannot be rushed.
That is exactly what software engineering needs to become. Right now anyone can finish a bootcamp in three months and call themselves a developer. That era is ending. What is replacing it is something much closer to a craft — where the real skill is not writing code but understanding why a system should be built a certain way, what will break two years from now, how a technical decision affects a real business with real people depending on it.
AI is very good at execution. Give it a clear task and it will produce working code faster than any human. But ask it to design a system from scratch for a problem it has never seen a messy, human, contradictory business problem — and it starts to struggle. That gap is where experienced engineers will live. And that gap is not closing anytime soon.
So what does this mean practically? It means the path forward for anyone serious about this profession is depth over speed. Find the most experienced engineer near you and get as close to them as possible. Study how they think, not just what they build. Learn system design. Understand the business behind the code. These are skills that do not expire.
The profession is not dying. It is growing up. There will be fewer engineers but the ones who remain will be doing work that genuinely matters, in a way that a tool will never fully replace.
Honestly, I think that is worth being excited about.
