An AI system cannot replace professional people. It doesn’t replicate or do the work that they do. That’s not what it is for and it is incapable of performing these tasks.

If you are using these systems you still need to know what you want and how to specify it. You can use agents to automate much of the work but it can’t tell you that your ideas are bad, that there’s a better way to accomplish your goals; it can’t tell you what you want. And if you can’t understand what it is outputting you’re failing in your primary task as a developer: understanding the problem.

I agree with the title. I just don’t think these systems will ever be capable of replacing humans. As much as product managers and executives would love it and not have to deal with us; they’ll just be shooting themselves in the foot if they try to replace professional developers with AI harnesses and fire all the people with the institutional knowledge and skill.

I think you may need to update your priors a bit. AI is already replacing professionals. Developers are already losing jobs. LLMs and agents are already running in the hot loops of our technological civilization, unsupervised, with root. Institutional knowledge and skills are already being lost.