Does artificial intelligence pose a threat to software engineering? Even though the tech industry frequently uses the cliché that “AI won’t replace you, but someone using AI will,” there has already been a significant change in the way code is written and maintained in 2025.
Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff stated in a January 2025 interview with the 20vc with Harry Stebbings podcast that the company would not be employing software engineers in 2025.
Salesforce.Ben said that engineering teams were able to enhance their productivity by 30% by utilizing Agentforce and AI technologies, which led to an amazing engineering velocity. Consequently, the organization will not be recruiting additional software developers in the following year.
Salesforce is not the only software development behemoth seeking to automate parts of their software engineering operations; we may dismiss these remarks as an attempt by the firm to promote its Agentforce assistance.
Does AI help or hurt software engineers? Techopedia asks experts and investigates trends.
2025: AI in Software Engineering
Benioff concluded the Salesforce story by saying, “We have an agentic layer, so we will have fewer support engineers next year.” Next year, we’ll have more salesmen because we need to make sure customers understand the precise benefits of artificial intelligence.
A resource shift is exemplified by Benioff’s statement that more money can be spent on product sales if less money is spent on product development. From the company’s perspective, reducing production costs is a reasonable (although not essential) business necessity.
Salesforce is hardly the only company experimenting with artificial intelligence. By the end of 2024, Google CEO Sundar Pichai asserted that over 25% of the company’s new code is produced by AI.
Meanwhile, over 97% of programmers, data scientists, and software engineers use AI coding tools at some point, according to a GitHub survey.
How does this manifest itself?
Coding assistants, which work side by side with developers to write and debug code, are among the most popular types. This gives the human developer more time to create and improve the performance of the code.
Even if code assistants aren’t yet ready to take the position of seasoned programmers, the field is continually growing and improving every month.
OpenAI revealed their progress on the O3 advanced reasoning model in December 2024. With the disclaimer that it was pre-trained on the benchmark, this model achieved a Codeforces score of 2727, putting ChatGPT o3 among the top 200 competitive coders.
Could Jobs for Software Engineers Be Replaced by AI?
Software engineering is more than simply writing code, so it’s vital to keep that in mind when evaluating whether AI could replace software engineers.
Therefore, we might be causing ourselves problems in the future. Any reader may probably think about how quickly things change by comparing their tech path to those of someone 20 years their elder. The next generation of software developers will probably begin their careers already prepared to work with AI.
However, there is a risk that we may lose most of the next generation and establish a significant skills and experience gap in the years to come if junior-level software engineers never show up.
How Software Engineers Can Benefit from AI
It’s crucial to emphasize that AI may and will reduce the amount of repetitive activities, making it an incredibly helpful tool for software developers as well.
For instance, a user can enter a code section and get recommendations on fixing errors, or they can enter a natural language prompt and start writing code and functions.
The Bottom Line
The usage of AI by Google and Salesforce demonstrates how the software industry is going through a significant change in the way that software is developed and maintained, and we will see an increasing number of companies experimenting with AI to improve their workflows.
AI may disrupt junior developers but also offer opportunities for increased productivity and scale-up innovation. Businesses may seek easy ways to boost profits. AI’s immediate impact on human career choices remains a topic of debate.
