Will AI replace a Software Engineer?
Estimated risk score: 68 out of 100
High replacement risk
Estimate · how we score
Our take: AI ships PRs faster than you do. Your moat is taste, architecture, and accountability.
Horizon: about 3 years. That is our estimate of how long until headcount in this role falls by 30% or more.
Median salary $145k a year · Engineering
What AI already does well
- Writing boilerplate code, CRUD endpoints, unit tests
- Debugging error logs and stack traces from production
- Translating tickets into working pull requests
What keeps you valuable
A high score means many of today’s tasks in this role can be automated — not that you will lose your job. People in roles like yours stay valuable by moving toward the work AI is bad at. Build on these:
- System architecture and tradeoff analysis across teams
- Hard-to-test domains: distributed consensus, security, performance
- Owning customer outcomes, not just code shipped
Keep going
The closest scores in Engineering
How we score. Each score is our estimate, from 0 to 100, of how exposed a role is to AI replacement, calibrated against published research: Goldman Sachs on generative AI (2023), McKinsey’s State of AI surveys, Brynjolfsson and Mitchell (Science, 2017) and Frey and Osborne (2013; published 2017). It is not a prediction about any one person and not career advice. Disagree with a score? Write to hello@yourstopwashit.com. Read the methodology
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