# Will AI replace Software Engineers? Do not hold your breath

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20429 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20429/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Reasoning Runtime Behavior of a Program with LLM: How Far Are We?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16437/) (2024)
- [Automatic Programming: Large Language Models and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02213/) (2024)
- [Agentic AI Software Engineers: Programming with Trust](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13767/) (2025)
- [Learning Program Behavioral Models from Synthesized Input-Output Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08597/) (2024)
- [tl;dr: Chill, y'all: AI Will Not Devour SE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00764/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology such as Large Language Models (LLMs) have become extremely popular in creating code. This has led to the conjecture that future software jobs will be exclusively conducted by LLMs, and the software industry will cease to exist. But software engineering is much more than producing code -- notably, maintaining large software and keeping it reliable is a major part of software engineering, which LLMs are not yet capable of.