Nobody Is Firing Their Doctor Because WebMD Exists. So Why Do People Think AI Will Replace Software Engineers?

Somewhere between ChatGPT writing its first Hello World and the fifteenth LinkedIn post this week declaring that “prompt engineering is the new coding,” someone decided that software engineers were done. Finished. Obsolete. Thanks for the memories, please collect your mechanical keyboard on the way out. There is just one problem with this theory. It is completely wrong. And the reason it is wrong is the same reason your doctor still has a job despite WebMD existing for twenty five years. What AI Is Actually Good At (Being Fair Before Being Ruthless) AI code generation tools are genuinely impressive. GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. These tools can write boilerplate, suggest implementations, explain error messages, and dramatically speed up work that a developer already knows how to do. The key phrase being: that a developer already knows how to do. A senior engineer with AI tools is faster. A non-engineer with AI tools is someone who will be very confidently wrong at 2am when some