It really depends on how you define a software engineer. If you mean software engineers doing what we do today, the market probably won’t.

If you just mean “people who make software in any capacity”, it will probably grow (or has already grown) via product, marketing, etc folks making internal tools with AI (which may not work out, we’ll see).

Presuming we keep seeing LLM improvements, SWE will move up the stack like they did in the past. They used to work directly with hardware and software. Ops folks sprung up to do the hardware, and SWEs do basically all software using abstractions over hardware. This will be another step up where SWEs no longer work directly on software, but rather on the tooling that writes software which they hand over to marketing, HR, etc.

Again, presuming this all works out the way the AI folks plan.