The AI revolution is rapidly redefining the world as we know it. With AI agents quickly gaining traction and broad adoption across major organizations to enhance effectiveness and efficiency, there's a possibility some professions might be rendered redundant soon. For context, AI agents serve as virtual assistants for professionals, automating repetitive tasks.
Last year, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang claimed coding might be dead in the water with the prevalence of AI. Instead, he recommended biology, education, manufacturing, or farming as plausible career options for the next generation. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman echoed Huang's sentiments, indicating:
"If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can't exactly predict where it is — it's possible that most developers are not coding."
And as it now seems, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shares the same opinion about software engineering as a plausible career option in the future while recently appearing at The Joe Rogan Experience show:
"Probably in 2025, we at Meta as well as the other companies that are basically working on this are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code."
🚨 Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan podcastin 2025, AI systems at Meta and other companies will be capable of writing code like mid-level engineers.at first, it's costly, but the systems will become more efficient as time passes.eventually, AI engineers will build most of… pic.twitter.com/iJtJqgXm19January 10, 2025
Zuckerberg admits that the enterprise could be costly to run initially but will become more efficient over time to a point where the code in apps, including the AI-generated equivalents, will actually be built by AI engineers instead of humans.
Coincidentally, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also shared Zuckerberg's opinion about the propensity of software engineering to be automated using AI. According to the executive, the company is "seriously debating" hiring software engineers in 2025. "I think in engineering this year at Salesforce, we're seriously debating maybe weren't gonna hire anybody this year because we've seen such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side-by-side with our engineers, making them more productive," the CEO added.
While top AI labs seem to share the opinion AI could potentially claim coding jobs from humans, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella envisions a future where organizations leverage Copilot Studio to create a swarm of tailored AI agents to make work easier.
Following OpenAI's launch of its o1 reasoning models, reports emerged touting their sophisticated software engineering capabilities. Per benchmarks shared, OpenAI o1 and o1-mini are exceptionally good at coding, passing OpenAI's research engineer hiring interview for coding at a 90-100% rate.
Software engineering isn't the only profession on AI's chopping block; architects and bankers have also been caught in the crossfire. According to a report, 54% of banking jobs are susceptible to AI automation. AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Copilot reportedly give interior designers and architects a run for their money, owing to their ability to generate sophisticated structural designs in seconds. Ironically, the same tools can't create images of a simple, plain white image.
