Will software engineers still exist in 2028? The answer is older than AI
A Chinese AI lab this week released a research prototype that watches developer chats and GitHub repositories on its own initiative and proposes code fixes unasked. DeepSeek's Super-Agent is admittedly incomplete, but one line in its documentation matters more than the tool: much of its engineering was done by code agents.
At the same time, a satirical video called "Software Engineers 2028" spread among developers, imagining a profession reduced to supervising machines. It touched a real anxiety: if agents can read the chat, write the fix and open the pull request, what is left?
History offers a precise answer, and it starts with the floppy disk. The disk did not vanish because people stopped storing data; it vanished because the function moved to better carriers. Job titles follow the same law: the typist disappeared not when writing ended, but when writing detached from the dedicated machine and person. Functions move on; titles linger, then retire.
Software engineering is now mid-shift. The transcription layer is moving to machines, and every leading lab offers a coding agent. But three hard layers remain: deciding what should exist, verifying machine-written code with due scepticism, and ownership - when a system breaks at 2 am, someone must carry the legal, financial and moral weight of the failure. No licence, contract or court assigns that to an agent.
Labour-market data tells the same story: demand is not shrinking but changing, with employers seeking engineers who can run AI tools and evaluate generated code. The real risk is the pyramid's shape. Senior engineers were once made by doing junior work slowly and badly; if machines absorb it, the training pipeline breaks. The answer is to redesign the ladder: pair juniors with agent output, teach evaluation as a skill, and treat supervising machines as a new craft.
So will the title exist in 2028? Certainly - titles die slowly. But it will describe a different reality: less typing, more deciding; less writing, more reading. The floppy disk's lesson is that needs outlive objects. Those who follow the need will prosper; those who guard the object will not.
