Devin demo last week has created lots of speculation about whether software engineering jobs will soon be replaced by AI. I don't think answer to this is simple.
If the marginal cost of building software slashes by 80%, world will simply move to build software in areas where it was not economical to build before. In other words.
- more custom enterprise software
- software in cars
- more robotics systems in everyday life running on software
- intelligent military hardware like autonomous drones
- with vision models retail, warehouses, hospitals, airports, security systems becomes smarter
And this all spawns additional domain specific challenges which need further software for analytics, performance, quality, security etc.
On question of whether number of software engineers will increase or decrease, there are two opposing forces at work, increasing software work, and AI automating lots of software writing tasks. Which force will win is tricky to predict.