Ask HN: Where are SWE's being replaced?
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Anecdotally, I’ve started seeing this with forward deployed / customer-facing engineers.
Some of that work is being absorbed by PMs or technically-minded operators using AI to handle the “glue” - small integrations, scripts, internal tools, etc.
It doesn’t remove the need for engineers, but it does reduce how many people you need for that layer. It feels more like compression than replacement.
I also don’t think engineers disappear - the role just blends more with others. I used to be a data scientist and now I’m in a more technical PM role interfacing with customers a lot, and I’m seeing engineers move in similar directions depending on their strengths.
Some of that work is being absorbed by PMs or technically-minded operators using AI to handle the “glue” - small integrations, scripts, internal tools, etc.
It doesn’t remove the need for engineers, but it does reduce how many people you need for that layer. It feels more like compression than replacement.
I also don’t think engineers disappear - the role just blends more with others. I used to be a data scientist and now I’m in a more technical PM role interfacing with customers a lot, and I’m seeing engineers move in similar directions depending on their strengths.
What evidence or statistics or reasoning backs this up?
Background: I see a lot of posts on the HN frontpage about AI, in fact it's difficult to find any posts that aren't about AI. As a software engineer, I use LLMs extensively to help with my job. I also see that these machines are clearly not good enough to be left alone (for example Codex) to design or write anything that has more than one user.
Despite this, I see countless comments here of people, highly upvoted, saying that they recommend getting out of software engineering, that engineers will all be replaced, etc. and I simply have not seen it. I haven't seen AIs capable of engineering, I haven't seen LLMs that don't ignore prompts and do whatever they have been trained instead, etc.
So, where are SWE's being replaced? What is the time-frame we're looking at? Is the "Claude Code will take your job" just Claude marketing, or is it real in any capacity?