> One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by A.I. coding tools

I think only a non-engineer (i.e, an executive) would actually believe this to be true.

I have not seen any evidence beyond anecdote that AI is replacing software engineers, even junior engineers. I still find federal interest rates to be a far more likely reason, as well as expectations of an impending recession. You hire junior developers when you want to grow your company, and growth is difficult in this economy.

> That is starting to change, especially in fields, such as software engineering, where there are clear markers of success and failure

Now I KNOW they're not a software engineer!

Personal anecdote: The company I'm working at now is hiring a ton of junior level and intern software engineers. They really want to implement AI so most of us are working on integrating it into internal workflows. Of course, the managers are aware of the hype & are mostly taking advantage of it to add more non-ai automation but reporting it to higher ups as AI.

Lets pretend a tech was replaced by AI.

The MBA has an idea of a new business app coded in rust.

How long will it take for the mba to have AI describe how to ssh into the linux server?

How long until they get beyond:

use std::net::{TcpListener, TcpStream};

use std::io::{Read, Write};

use std::thread;

It's completely unreasonable to think AI is replacing people.