Over the past two years, artificial intelligence has arguably become the most talked-about topic in the IT industry. It's now almost impossible to open a tech news feed without seeing another headline claiming that AI will soon replace software engineers, that yet another startup has raised millions of dollars thanks to AI, or that a major technology company has switched its employees to AI coding agents while reducing the size of its engineering teams.
At the same time, the software engineering job market has been going through one of its most challenging periods in recent years. The number of open positions has declined, entry-level developers are finding it increasingly difficult to land their first job, and even experienced engineers are discovering that recruiters are no longer reaching out as aggressively as they did just a few years ago. Finding a new position can now take months.
This raised an obvious question for me: is artificial intelligence really the primary reason behind these changes, or are we witnessing several independent trends that simply happened to converge at the same time?
Over the past few months, I've read dozens of industry reports, engineering blogs, interviews with technology executives, and research papers on the adoption of generative AI in software development. The more I learned, the clearer it became that reality is far more nuanced than the headlines suggesting that AI is about to replace software engineers overnight.
