For many software engineers, the text editor is half full.
Even as companies like Microsoft, CrowdStrike, and OpenText recently announced plans to slash their software departments or downsize while affirming AI priorities, coders who spoke with IT Brew feel confident in their place amidst the automation.
In favor. A Stack Overflow study, conducted in May and June 2024, found that 72% of more than 65,000 respondents consider AI tools “favorable or very favorable” for development; 70% said they did not “perceive AI as a threat” to their job.
An October 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 42% of “AI users” across all industries believe that the tech’s use will lead to fewer job opportunities. Those in “information and technology,” however, were among the most hopeful, according to the study: 16% of that group said AI would likely lead to more employment chances.
“I think a big reason why a lot of software engineers might say that they’re not worried about being replaced is because the true power comes from [AI] enhancing a set of skills you already have,” Graham Paasch, a network and automation engineer, told us.
Take vibe coding—or a language-to-code prompting style that has been used to at least build toy apps lately.
“A software engineer is going to be better at vibe coding than someone completely new to software development,” Paasch said.
Paasch is currently trying to augment his cloud-environment expertise and studying for his AWS cloud practitioner certification, given the essential role cloud computing will likely play in AI. He believes a human presence will be needed to guide agentic AI.
“We’ll need basically what will look like a symphony conductor, someone to guide these AIs to do the things they’re best at,” he said.
Josue Matos, a former UI lead engineer who stepped away from the role willingly in April to reassess his career path, sees AI as a “companion,” not a replacement. He has expertise in the JavaScript framework known as React and still foresees using it, even in a future of AI-driven coding. Matos sees human developers as vital overseers of code, given the high criticality of systems.
“AI doesn’t know how to communicate to the designer and then communicate to a product manager and then maybe talk to a focus group and listen in like a fly on the wall. It wants to do all that at once without really knowing what it is,” he said.
Entry with caution. The Bureau of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook forecasts growth for software developers but a decline for computer programmers. While the roles overlap, software developers often have broader design responsibilities requiring both technical and nontechnical skills, compared to programmers who primarily focus on writing, modifying, and testing code. (The Washington Post recently reported that a quarter of programming jobs have disappeared.)
Overall employment of software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers is projected to grow 17% from 2023 to 2033, according to the Bureau’s handbook—“much faster than the average for all occupations.” Computer programmer employment, however, is projected to decline 10% over the same period, the Bureau says.
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According to the Tech Layoff Tracker, as of May 2025, layoffs at over 300 tech companies have impacted 76,440 employees, averaging 513 people per day; that’s 140 fewer laid-off employees, on average, than in 2024.
It’s unclear still to Tom Davenport, professor of information technology and management at Babson College, if recent layoffs are being driven by generative AI productivity improvements or Covid-era overhiring, but he sees “occupational risk” for new coders in particular.
“There’s some widespread feeling at the moment that it’s useful to have experienced software engineers who can review generated code, fix it up, and determine how to make it better, but for entry-level software engineers, that’s really what the code generation system is capable of developing,” he told us. “And so I worry more for them.”
He advises that entry-level coders need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of generated code and the circumstances where it’s likely to make errors, which means that “learning how to program without code generation is probably not that great of an idea,” Davenport said.
In its tech employment outlook, CompTIA predicts that the number of software developers and engineers will increase from of 1.7 million in 2024 to 2.2 million by 2034. According to James Stanger, chief technology evangelist for CompTIA, , the numbers suggest that software developer and engineer roles will remain steady for some time, because orgs will need people with the skills to look deeply into code and ensure that it fulfills the organization’s needs.
“You need to prove your worth by being a strategic part of the conversations. If you’re waiting for a ticket to develop code, you’re going to get offshored to somewhere, whether it be AI or somewhere in another part of the world,” he told us.
Get to know the tools. Armando Franco, director of technology modernization at TEKsystems Global Services, said that a developer on his team recently demo’d an AI agent that could build a Kubernetes cluster (a series of containerized applications), complete with an architectural diagram and the code required to build it.
The idea—one that still required validation, Franco warned—demonstrated that someone on the team quickly took initiative to address a challenge.
“Build an agent to solve a problem within your organization, and then showcase that to your manager,” Franco recommended.
The future is uncoded. Professor Davenport likes to say “if you’re not paranoid about what generative AI is doing for your job, then you’re not really paying attention.” He wonders where the next class of experienced coders will come from.
“You need to position yourself as someone who can be the critical-thinking, code-generation reviewer and editor of the future,” he said.
That requires some optimism. Matos still sees engineers as essential, supportive professions in a high-tech, highly automated future.
“We're still innovating, and we’re still the leaders of the innovation. I think that there may be a future where there are less engineers, but there are still engineers,” Matos said.“[If] you’re a problem solver at your heart, this is just another problem to solve.”