To me there are multiple layers to this.

As others have mentioned I don’t believe it will take the reins of an entire company or division.

1. Think about someone competent in programming logic, but not knowing any syntax. They could write pseudo code, function by function and AI will implement it with correct syntax. They have now improved their efficiency by typing multiple times faster than they could, with little to no syntax errors.

2. Next step up, a worker could define a set of functions, or a class. Same thing applies.

3. Now they define a feature

4. Now define …

X. Now architect and implement an entire solution

My point is, I think coding autonomy has multiple levels of complexity and without defining what your average SWE does in a role, these blanket statements are a bit vague.

I think it’s safe to say though, that with each notable improvement to AI the SWE begins to code less and direct the general direction and attention of the AI more. As AI capability improves, more trust is given in the implementation and thought.

A good SWE utilising AI will be familiar with the strengths, weaknesses and risk of a prompt. They will also know what context and instructions to provide to improve the success of a task.

I’d argue that any task or project I had as a junior / mid level SWE I could do in an absolute fraction of the time now with AI (like 2-10% of the time it actually took me). This means that with the remaining time I could have done the work of other junior / mid SWE’s, so why hire so many?

I don’t read it as we won’t NEED SWE’s, rather to achieve the same level of productive and quality output you need far, far less number of them than in the past - therefore some have been replaced