Will AI replace software engineers? It depends on who you ask

Artificial intelligence (AI) will soon be performing the essential tasks of software engineers -- or so the experts say. Sarah Friar, chief financial officer for OpenAI, proclaimed AI-as-software-engineer's emerging role at a recent Goldman Sachs conference. OpenAI's pending AI agent, called A-SWE (Agentic Software Engineer), "is not just augmenting the current software engineers in your workforce, but instead is literally an agentic software engineer that can build an app for you. It can take a [pull request] that you can give to any other engineer and go build it." Also: Why OpenAI's new AI agent tools could change how you code Not only does A-SWE build the app, but "it does all the things that software engineers hate to do, it does its own quality assurance, its own bug testing and bug bashing, and documentation," Friar continued. "Things that you could never get software engineers to do.