Google’s chief scientist said that 25% of Google’s code is generated by AI. It this a death bell for the profession of software engineering ?

As usual the truth is often not clear and predictions about future are often wrong. But again, the trends do speak for themselves as well. The code editors are increasingly getting better with AI tools and in many cases can even build fairly complex software based on just prompts.

Andrew Ng, one of the most popular AI scientist of our times these days is teaching Vibe Coding using Replit. This should point to the fact that AI based coding is here to stay.

AI’s ability to write code.

Writing code is very much aligned with what AI is good at. Programming languages are very formal so once written it is very easy to argue about their properties. They are also about patterns. There are not too many ways to solve a problem, in fact most solutions nicely fit into few design patterns. Whatever code you are writing, it is nearly certain that someone else out there before you have written that exact same code.

This makes it easier for an AI model to properly understand the concept of coding and then write new code. We can very easily see this today when using something like VS Code with Github co-pilot. It can detect the CSS rule we are trying to write, the JAVA method we are writing to validate an email and so on. This is because such code has been written millions of times in past.

All this points to code being written by AI more and more and especially for trivial use cases.

Impact on jobs

Even if we believe AI is going to write a lot of code, the AI needs to be built by someone. The AI fleet has to be managed. This work again will involve a lot of AI but would need human intervention too. AI can not create new programming languages and frameworks on its own. It needs to be told to make those.

Large system architecture needs to be done by humans right now and likely will remain a human job for a long time.

However, when AI writes code it can write a LOT of code. AI will likely scale the process of coding to levels we have not seen before. When so much code is written we would obviously need a lot of human coders even if they are going toe write only 5% of the code.

Why humanity is better served by AI coders

Ultimately even if the coding jobs reduce humanity will usher in this new era of AI coders where the software will be significantly better, cheaper and quicker. This will bring economic benefits to entire society.