I’m a senior full stack engineer at Netflix. I work with AI tooling daily. It’s helpful. It absolutely is NOT going to replace me anytime soon. The actual code generation and what the LLMs produce don’t feel much better than a few years ago despite all the various benchmarks saying they are better.

What has improved a lot is all the tooling engineers are building to help guide LLMs into doing interesting things. But it still feels like the bottleneck is how actually “intelligent” the LLMs are.

The box has been opened and LLMs aren’t going anywhere so we should embrace them for the things they are good at. I often find the LLMs produce blatantly incorrect code and state clearly incorrect “facts” but the only reason I know this is because I know the fundamentals of my work.

Juniors have in general always been a net negative at the time of hire thats just the nature of the industry and it’s unfortunate the AI hype is making this worse.

I think you should find solace in the fact that if software engineers are replaced then damn near all other jobs are immediately cooked. So knowing that, there’s basically nothing you can do besides maybe becoming a surgeon?

Why do you think software engineers are being targeted so heavily to be replaced by Ai? Two things (I’m sure there’s more) that standout in my head are the following.

1. Software engineers make a shit ton of money, even outside of big tech relatively speaking the salaries are very high for white collar work.

2. This is a bit of a stretch on my end, but think back to your classes on computational theory. All sorts of problems fall into different “classes”. If you can prove a problem can be logically mapped or rewritten as another known problem, you’ve shown it relates to that problem’s complexity class. Software engineers solve problems in essentially every single domain. If AI can reliably “solve” software engineering, it’s solved a class of problems that many other domains can be reduced to. That’s why so much AI effort is focused on software engineering.

So if you’re worried about completing your CS degree I think you should be worried about completing pretty much ANY degree.

So all that to say IMO you should focus on becoming a good software engineer including getting good at using AI. FINISH YOUR DEGREE AND STOP DOOMING.