I think that some engineers will still be needed to maintain old codebases for a while yes.
But it's pretty clear that the codebases of tomorrow will be leaner and mostly implemented by AI, starting with apps (web, mobile,...). It will take more time for scaling backends.
So my bet is that the need for software engineering will follow what happened for stock brokers. The ones with basic to average skills will disappear, automated away (it has already happened in some teams at my last job). Above average engineers will still be employed my comp will eventually go down. And there will be a small class of expert / smartest / most connected engineers will see their comp go up and up.
It is not the future we want but I think it what is most likely to happen.
What makes you think that AI is going to produce leaner codebases? They are trained on human codebases. They are going to end up emulating that human code. It's not hard to imagine some improvement here, but my gut is there just isn't enough good code out there to train a significant shift on this.
Good question and I have no strong answer today. But I think we'll find a way to tune models to achieve this very soon.
I see such a difference between what is built today and codebases from 10 years ago with indirections everywhere, unnecessary complexity,.. I interviewed for a company with a 13yo RoR codebase recently after a few mins looking at the code decided I didn't want to work there.
But it's pretty clear that the codebases of tomorrow will be leaner and mostly implemented by AI, starting with apps (web, mobile,...). It will take more time for scaling backends.
So my bet is that the need for software engineering will follow what happened for stock brokers. The ones with basic to average skills will disappear, automated away (it has already happened in some teams at my last job). Above average engineers will still be employed my comp will eventually go down. And there will be a small class of expert / smartest / most connected engineers will see their comp go up and up.
It is not the future we want but I think it what is most likely to happen.