Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor take the layoff narrative apart with numbers: only 0.2% of New York layoff filings cite AI displacement, developers spend somewhere between 9% and 61% of their time actually writing code, and just 44% of agent-generated code survives into user commits. Their sandwich model puts the durable human work in the decide and deliver layers — specification, judgment, accountability — while AI compresses only the execution in the middle. 'If there is a ceiling to the demand for code, we are nowhere near it.' The 364-comment HN thread mostly agrees, with the recurring line that every productivity gain in software's history has moved the goalposts rather than shrunk the profession.

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