I actually think AI has an unfair advantage with software that is making it seem far more capable that it is. Software is entirely text based, and producers have been putting their outputs and problem solving online for free for decades.

I think applying AI to other white collar roles that also require problem solving but do not have as much training, will prove much more difficult. Even coding on proprietary dominated domains is a much, much worse experience than people have with more accessible code. Using it for electronics has been hit or miss, embedded software is a bit shakey, game development is also challenging to use it for etc.

I get what you’re saying, but it’s not as though there are trillions of books and blog posts and stackexchange questions about excel and the handful of other things that most office workers do, too.

I honestly figured that’s why everyone is coming out with MS Office plugins for all the models, and MS itself is putting it in the tools.

So if most any company only needs one person to solve limited IT issues, prompt code production and deployment, generate the usual truckloads of excel spreadsheets, and do most of the finance and accounting… it starts to look pretty scary.

Then, what about the people making and maintaining all the facilities for these people we don’t need anymore? The world flipped its lid about commercial real estate when wfh became a thing. That was relatively small and temporary.

> Then, what about the people making and maintaining all the facilities for these people we don’t need anymore?

And all the small businesses like local restaurants and coffee shops that they frequent, etc, etc.

There are so many 2nd order contagion impacts if the knowledge work economy implodes that very few people won't be negatively impacted to some significant degree.

And some people seem to think that outcome means the government will step in and engineer some sort of soft landing. And outside of the US this may very well be true, but here in the US? Seems unlikely.

There’s a reason AI is banned in Dune and Warhammer 40K

While I see your point, I think AI may be banned in those universes for the same reason that time-travelling devices tend to be written out of sci-fi and fantasy: Stories are better without them. (If one counts the ever unfolding history of the world as a story, my counter-point actually validates your original point. Touché.)

Those broads limitations also make writing the stories easier, since the author/worldbuilder doesn't have to come up with 100 different reasons why it can't be done for each particular case. He only have to do it once.

No other profession has such a corpus of free training data available.

Marketing content creator and translator. But they're already half-extinct.

Really? Have you ever heard of "literature"?

In my eyes, prose is meant to convey the complexity of human experience and emotion. LLMs can't succeed here by definition.

I know a lot of people working across portfolio management and tax accounting. Nobody I know of is using LLMs much and frankly their management has started to back-off pushing it more in the workplace.

LLMs suit some jobs more than others. Its quite possible SWE's are the only profession massively affected - whether that means a evolution of the role or decline/death is another question.

> I know a lot of people working across portfolio management and tax accounting. Nobody I know of is using LLMs much and frankly their management has started to back-off pushing it more in the workplace.

I could say the same thing for software engineers I know as recently as the middle of last year, things can change very quickly.

Up until about December 2025 the fact that LLMs would replace us all (SWEs) was the punchline to a joke for most working developers I know. But most of the ones I know aren't laughing anymore, unless its a nervous laugh.

LLMs may (likely will) disrupt software developers first, but I don't think we are particularly unique and I don't see any reason why the same risks won't spread to virtually all knowledge work, especially if executives in those fields see a significant amount of SWEs being replaced by LLMs as an initial test case.

There are still a few quantum leaps needed. I have had great results with Opus 4.6, in particular in green field. But it behaved real messy in some professional real life projects. It seems you also need to tell it very specifics things some times but for that you need to do a software developer in the first place.

We'll see.

LLMs certainly aren't ready to replace all software developers yet.

They may never reach that point.

But even if they never get good enough to replace all software developers, they can still cause massive job losses by allowing companies to do the same work with far fewer developers.

Why would they do the same amount of work with fewer devs when they could also get much more done with the same amount of developers?

Sorry man. This feels like you are hoping SWE alone isn’t affected.

Unfortunately the workflow of a software engineer has been to do things like asking questions on stack overflow to do their job - to use digital resources scattered across the web - to show examples of code freely across the web.

The workflow of an accountant, portfolio manager etc has nothing to do with accessing and using the web in the same manner. If you did their jobs you’d know this, but you don’t. Right?

Is it really a surprise? Nope. Thankfully writing code isn't enough. So your job is still somewhat safe for now.

Tax and accounting is rule based reporting. With formal authorities and openly available rulesets on right and wrong. There’s judgement in it, but that’s even less true than in development. Maybe someone makes the case that there’s art and ergonomics in it too, but not more than swe.

Professional accreditation and responsibility is its only real moat. And those are “yeah but!” issues we hand-wave in discussions around swe too.

Otherwise those are more vulnerable.