Mark Zuckerberg once bet big on the Metaverse; now his sights are on engineering AI. Are we looking at the next tech revolution, or another moonshot?

Zuckerberg's recent comments have lead to lots of chat about AI replacing software engineers. So what's the truth? Let's start by examining what he actually said, rather than what people claim he said:

"Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code"

OK, so that's a bit less than "no more engineers". Filler phrases like "probably" and "sort of" hide a lot of nuance.

So is AI going to replace software engineers in 2025?

In a word, no. Not a hope.

But to be clear, AI is transforming how we do software engineering. I use AI a lot - every day, most hours even. It's an enormous help. Sometimes it helps me when I'm feeling lazy, writing mundane code and helping me to focus on more important/challenging things. Sometimes it helps me tackle things I wouldn't know how to do without it. And sometimes it hunts down obscure bugs in my code that would take me hours to do. My workflow is utterly transformed and I now cannot imagine coding without o1 and Claude. The impact is undeniable.

But I'm still here writing code. I've not handed over to an AI and cannot imagine today's AI being able to do my job for me. AI is a tool that helps improve my job, it makes me more productive, it helps me do things I might otherwise need to find a specialist to help me with. It even makes things more fun, because I get to spend more time on "what should we actually build" and think about things a bit more. But it cannot do my job for me.

The new tools help humans be better and more productive, rather than automating humans out of a job. I'm talking Cursor, Lovable, Windsurf, V0, Bolt and more: a group of vendor's and products you've probably never heard of.

But there are challenges - not least, security of your code. You'll probably want to know the details of what the new wave of tools do with that code and how to configure them so that your passwords and keys don't end up on someone else's servers.

Here's the thing: the only people who can evaluate the utility and potential of these AI tools are software engineers. The vast majority of them will relish the opportunity to play with a new toy. A bit a time and space to look at how this new wave of tooling might be useful would likely pay off several times over.