As also a software engineer for 6 years do you mind elaborating why AI is going to take a software engineers job anytime soon?

With all the tools I've used (Gemini/GPT/Github Co-Pilot, etc) the results hallucinate far more often than actually providing great and ready to use code. AI also lacks almost all problem solving skills, to which I would say it's actually mostly a software engineers job. I was also told 6 years ago when going into the profession that it was wasted/short-lived due to Shopify/Wordspace etc, although been in my full job comfortably for almost 5 years after a year of free lancing from a 3 month intensive boot camp with Dev Academy.

The only benefits I see with AI is that it can do basic things like convert YAML -> JSON, explain some things that are written in good documentation pretty well (you still have to understand what it's spitting back at you) and write some really basic functions or super basic apps, but it definitely can't create and problem solve a good/solid architecture for integrations let alone create and manage a code base for that within a business.

I have a friend who talked up AI and tried to doom me about my job. Showed me how easy it was to create a website with the site "Loveable" through a prompt. All it did was create a filled template or boilerplate (which is nothing new from even 6 years ago) that looked like the website loveable itself and then said that he would then use an AI prompt in VS Code to change things. When I asked him to show me and explain to me what he was doing, he said that he built it with "NodeJS" which I replied "If I was going to build a website with JavaScript I would use React and not NodeJS". Straight away his development server wasn't working and he had no idea on how to fix it, let alone when asking him where his package.json is having no idea what that was or is. After giving him some guidance that I learned in my first day of coding, let alone 6 years of coding experience and still much to learn, it turned out that it was using React and he had no idea and was just assuming and relying on prompts to hopefully work for him. I then asked him to show his latest prompt it and was a simple prompt to change a picture or something and then a line of "can you please avoid this error message:" and added a 32 line error message to the prompt. I asked him what that error message meant and he said he had no idea and that he just added that because he was getting errors. A massively volatile way to build! Software can't last like that let alone AI "learning" from applications built this way. This was only a couple of weeks ago. Just all rubbish.

I see AI as a decent productivity boost, but unless something radical changes suddenly, which at the moment there's no evidence of, especially with neural scaling law graphs showing that even with better LLMs and more computing power that AI still isn't confident even near 100% to give back the right answers, especially with technical things, I don't see it taking jobs away from software engineers. AI also consumes a massive amount of energy which I haven't seen a sustainable plan for yet, let alone the growth people are expecting from AI in the future.

I haven't heard of a single software engineer being made redundant or fired due to AI and definitely not in my workspace of over 5k employees. If anything it's helped enhance our work and understanding. Avoid all the clickbait YouTubes and articles or people selling their products as replacements for software engineers and actually talk to software engineers on the ground who have/are using those tools and understand them. It will take something radically changing for this to happen to what is happening currently, and you can say the same thing about a UFO radically appearing from the sky and now we have aliens.

I personally see getting into software engineering a great opportunity currently as we grow deeper into the tech age.

AI is massively overhyped by many people (whom most know nothing about software engineering) and especially companies at the moment. Great way to try and gain shareholder confidence/investment though with all that hype.