According to a new analysis by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor, discussed by Simon Willison, AI is unlikely to replace software engineers—even though the profession seems uniquely vulnerable. The evidence is striking: New York required companies to disclose AI-related layoffs in WARN Act filings for the first time, yet in over 160 filings in the first year, not a single company checked that box. The insight is revealing. Writing code turns out to be the easy part. The real bottlenecks are much harder to automate: deciding what to build, verifying it works, and understanding the codebase and business deeply enough to make sound decisions. That human judgment remains irreplaceable.

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