Monzo co-founder and Y Combinator partner Tom Blomfield has kicked up a stir by tolling the death knell of the humble software engineer, claiming that AI will soon be “provably and obviously better at basically every facet” of coding.
Blomfield recently took to X to make an analogy: “Software engineers are highly-paid farmers, tending their crops by hand. We just invented the combine harvester. The world is going to have a lot more food and a lot fewer farmers in very short order.”
The claim drew a heated response, with hundreds of replies, some supportive but many – often from disgruntled software engineers – pushing back at the idea that AI will make them redundant.
Blomfield has posted a blog expanding on his point, suggesting that people disagreeing with him are failing to realise how good the technology has become: “People who tried and dismissed AI coding products even six months ago need to re-evaluate their assumptions. Last month, I probably spent 80-100 hours using these tools. They are genuinely astonishing.”
What does this mean for the humans doing what until now have been highly-skilled and well-rewarded jobs?
“In the near future, I can imagine a software team that is entirely composed of AI agents,” writes Blomfield. “Of course there will be human review of and guidance of these iterations, at least at first. But at some point in the next five years, I expect some (obviously not all) coding teams to be entirely self-directing.
“The idea that a human will need to handwrite code in future will seem very quaint. People might still do it for fun, just like we drive classic cars today.”
And, software engineering is just the “canary in the coal mine,” with doctors, lawyers, accountants, auditors, architects and engineers all set to see AI come for their jobs.
As for what this means for the future of society, Blomfield concludes with a mixed prognosis: “I’m extremely hopeful for the future. I think we may be able to cure basically every known disease. We may dramatically extend the human lifespan. This future could be very positive for humanity.
“I’m also extremely worried. I think the short-term impact on hundreds of millions of people is going to be very profound, and I don’t think many people are prepared.”
Source: techfocus24.com