Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
The article argues that AI has not caused mass layoffs among software engineers and is unlikely to do so. Evidence includes the lack of AI-related WARN filings in New York and the identification of core tasks—decision making, verification, and deep domain understanding—that resist automation. While AI can aid coding and some decision‑support activities, the human insight required for these tasks remains essential.
- ▪Data from the first year of New York's AI disclosure checkbox on WARN Act filings shows no company flagged AI as a factor in layoffs.
- ▪Surveys of software engineers indicate that most time is spent on meetings and debugging rather than pure coding.
- ▪Qualitative analysis identified three primary bottlenecks: deciding what to build, verifying delivered work, and deep human understanding of code, business, and environment.
- ▪AI tools can assist with typing code and some decision‑support tasks, but they cannot replace the deep contextual knowledge engineers provide.
Simon Willison files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 51 of its stories.
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| Original publisher | Simon Willison |
| Canonical URL | https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/14/why-ai-hasnt-replaced-software-engineers/#atom-everything |
| Publication time | 2026-06-14T23:54:11+00:00 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-15T00:07:33.547Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-15T00:07:33.547Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 6iKxX66w9Lw- |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t. Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In this essay, we argue that there is enough evidence to reject the narrative that once AI capabilities reach a certain threshold, it will cause mass layoffs. Given that this is true even in a sector with very few regulatory barriers, most other professions are likely to be even more cushioned. The first good news is that the data still doesn't support the idea that AI is causing mass unemployment. In March 2025, New York became the first U.S. state to add an AI disclosure checkbox to WARN Act filings.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Simon Willison.
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