Quoting Chip Huyen

2 minutes read

The best explanation I've seen for why AI is not going to replace software engineers:

I think it goes back to the question of what software engineering is. So maybe I can use an analogy to help explain it better.

Take writing, for example. We tend to confuse the most salient activity of something with the job itself. In the past, writing meant the physical act of putting words onto paper. Back then, people thought of writing as that physical act and took pride in their calligraphy. People would say, "Oh, I have beautiful handwriting; you must be smart, you must be intelligent."

But then we had computers, and now writing doesn't refer to that act anymore. Writing refers to the process of arranging ideas into a readable format.

And I think it's the same with coding. Now, people think of software engineering as a physical act: putting code into VS Code, Vim, or whatever editor they use. But that's not what software engineering is.

Software engineering is about solving problems. Consider a problem: How do I come up with executable programs to solve it? Coding itself is just a physical act.

From The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast

19.4.2025 UPDATE: When I first published this post I used an LLM to extract the quote from the MP3 that I downloaded from the link above. I don't remember the prompt but it was something along the lines of "Give me the verbatim where the interviewee compares software engineering to writing". Given the publishing date I believe I used Gemini 1.5 Flash. The LLM response captured the essence of the argument but butchered the ending. Here's the old version. I knew it was wrong, but still published it. It annoyed me since, so today I've updated the post with a new verbatim. I used a similar prompt with the same audio file against the new Gemini 2.5 Flash:

Here's a modified quote from this podcast:

[OLD POST QUOTE]

Find the verbatim quote from the podcast.

I then passed the results through another call with the prompt:

Convert this transcription of spoken text into what it would look like if was written text. It should be ready to post to social media.

I didn't double checked it against the podcast but it's more in line with what I remember so here we go.