Comment by civilian

I think the better way to avoid our replacement is to think about our non-coding contributions to our companies.

I'm a full-time software engineer, but I spend maybe 50% of my day implementing code. I spend a lot of time figuring out trade-offs, exploring edge cases, and verifying that the business/marketing people know what the side-effects of a given feature will be. There's also a lot of flag-waving to make sure that small problems don't become big problems.

I've run into the "that should be able to be automated" hand-wave of a thought before. I think it's always done by people who haven't actually spent time thinking about the edge-cases and all the little decisions that are put into a final software project. Sure, you can hand-wave and get a CMS, but you're going to be unpleasantly surprised when the defaults don't match your subconscious expectations.

Here's how software engineers could retain their position in a world where our code is automatically generated:

- Understand and communicate the trade-offs of different solutions

- Embrace product design-- a lot of us unwittingly become novice visual designers and product designers during our work, and we should embrace that domain knowledge that we learn, rather than being frustrated that we're being taken away from our primary task, coding.

- Explore edge cases, and explore new ways of doing things

- Understand and get involved in the business process!