Will AI replace Software Engineers? Do not hold your breath

TL;DR

This paper argues that despite AI advancements like LLMs in code generation, the complex tasks of maintaining and ensuring reliability in software engineering mean humans will continue to play a crucial role, preventing AI from fully replacing software engineers.

Contribution

It highlights the limitations of LLMs in software maintenance and reliability, emphasizing that AI cannot yet replace human software engineers in these critical areas.

Findings

LLMs excel at code generation but lack in maintenance capabilities.

Maintaining large software systems remains a human-driven task.

AI's role in software engineering is supportive, not substitutive.

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology such as Large Language Models (LLMs) have become extremely popular in creating code. This has led to the conjecture that future software jobs will be exclusively conducted by LLMs, and the software industry will cease to exist. But software engineering is much more than producing code -- notably, \emph{maintaining} large software and keeping it reliable is a major part of software engineering, which LLMs are not yet capable of.