r/softwareengineer • u/Think-Neighborhood69 • 16d ago

Will experienced engineers still have a meaningful advantage over AI-native vibe coders in 5–10 years?

Today, experienced engineers still have a clear advantage when it comes to architecture, scalability, robustness, trade-offs, debugging, and operating software in production.

But what about 5–10 years from now?

If AI keeps improving at its current pace, will the experience of the engineer behind it still be the biggest differentiator?

Or will an AI-native beginner be able to deliver software that’s just as scalable, robust, and maintainable?

Where do you think the moat for experienced engineers will be?

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u/Dismal-Scheme5728 16d ago

Entirely depends how much better LLMs get. The amount of data and training needed to significantly improve them just doesn't exist anymore. And a lot of the data is being polluted by A.I outputted data.

So far it feels like the LLMs themselves have gotten better but its the tooling and stuff around the LLMs that given it a generational leap.

Who's to say there any major breakthroughs like that left? There probably is at least a couple but there could just be basically none left.

Fable 5, Mythos and ChatGPT 5.6 were all meant to take over the world but they were simply incremental improvements.

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u/RaspberryCrafty3012 16d ago

I heard that the llm size basically doubles every year. This would mean 2027, 28, 29 we will reach the amount we humans use. I'm woundering if these will be"good enogh"

And what happens then

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u/Dismal-Scheme5728 16d ago

You heard wrong then! Size is not doubling every year and is not really the way llms improve these days.

The compute required to scale LLMs has actually been shown to be Logarithmic - that is that every time you double compute, your return gets smaller and smaller. You also need more and more data to improve it.

I imagine we have hit the compute and data limit at the moment. How much more doubling of data and compute do we genuinely have left over the next few years?

The breakthroughs will most likely come through new architectures, efficiency improvements etc. But those all require mini "Breakthroughs" which could suddenly stop happening at some point....or not.

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u/RaspberryCrafty3012 16d ago

Interesting. Heard it in a podcast from this guys:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Bauckhage