Coding Will Become Common, Engineering Will Stay Scarce

AI makes coding easier, but it does not make everyone a software engineer.

Web 2.0 already showed us this pattern. Most people never learned to run servers, manage databases, or deploy websites. They used SaaS, social networks, and other products that hid that complexity.

AI may work the same way. Most people will get intelligence through products such as ChatGPT, instead of running their own models, agents, tools, and infrastructure.

Vibe coding lowers the cost of creating software, but creating code is not the same as software engineering. Real systems still need security, reliability, permissions, deployment, monitoring, and recovery. Agent systems can make this even harder, since an LLM’s output is not deterministic.

So AI may not reduce the need for software engineers. It may expand where they can work. Engineers can bring their tools into medicine, science, finance, education, and other fields where custom software was once too expensive to build.