One major aspect of software engineering is social, requirements analysis and figuring out what the customer actually wants, they often don't know.
If a human engineer struggles to figure out what a customer wants and a customer struggles to specify it, how can an LLM be expected to?
Probably going to have the same outcome.
Setting up a system to make decisions autonomous is technically easy. Ensuring that it makes the right decisions, though, is a far harder task.
I actually imagine it's the opposite of what you say here. I think technically inclined "IT business partners" will be able of creating applications entirely without software engineers... Because I see that happen every day in the world of green energy. The issues come later, when things have to be maintained, scale or become efficient. This is where the software engineering comes in, because it actually matters if you used a list or a generator in your Python app when it iterates over millions of items and not just a few hundreds.
It does need to be reliable, though. LLMs have proven very bad at that
That was the way I saw it for a while. In recent months I've begun to wonder if I need to reevaluate that, because it's become clear to me that scaling doesn't actually start from zero. By zero I mean that I was naive enough to think that all programs, even the most googled programmed one by a completely new junior would at least have, some, efficiency... but some of these LLM services I get to work on today are so bad they didn't start at zero but at some negative number. It would have been less of an issue if our non-developer-developers didn't use Python (or at least used Python with ruff/pyrefly/whateveryoulike, but some of the things they write can't even scale to do minimal BI reporting.
Chat UIs are an excellent customer feedback loop. Agents develop new iterations very quickly.
LLMs can absolutely handle abstractions and different kinds of component systems and overall architecture design.
They can also handle requirements analysis. But it comes back to iteration for the bottom line which means fast turnaround time for changes.
The robustness and IQ of the models continue to be improved. All of software engineering is well underway of being automated.
Probably five years max where un-augmented humans are still generally relevant for most work. You are going to need deep integration of AI into your own cognition somehow in order to avoid just being a bottleneck.
Software engineering, is a different thing, and I agree you're right (for now at least) about that, but don't underestimate the sheer amount of brainless coders out there.
I would argue it’s a good thing to replace the actual brainless activities.
It really depends on the organization. In many places product owners and product managers do this nowadays.
Presumably, they're trained on a ton of requirements docs, as well as a huge number of customer support conversations. I'd expect them to do this at least as well as coding, and probably better.