a lot of my family members and friends (especially my dad :) ) ask me about what i think of AI in the field of computer science. honestly, i agree with some of the sentiments that people share on linkedin/social media. AI is already having an irreversible and huge effect on how software engineers code, especially young ones (my age and younger). however, i draw a lot more optimistic conclusions from those sentiments than what i've been seeing online.
i do think that a lot of full stack work, particularly on the frontend, can be automated with AI in the near future if it is leveraged correctly. a lot of time consuming/monotonous coding tasks involved in building UIs can easily be made faster using assistants like cursor/claude code. such tasks are now also accessible even to those without a coding background; i think this is a very good thing. more people prototyping of ideas and more people building software will allow for more world-changing tools and market validation of ideas.
however, i don't see this is as a net negative for software engineers. my mom was mentioning that one of my cousins in high school was considering doing computer science but was having second thoughts because his friends told him that software engineers would be replaced by AI soon anyway. to be honest, this kind of dooming irks me a lot, especially when its shared on social media.
it's true that AI will probably spawn generations of computer science students that are over reliant on AI and don't have a strong grasp of fundamentals. at surface, this is very bad, both for the industry and for the students themselves.
however, the line of thought that this will lead to a loss of jobs for talented developers doesn't make any sense to me. if the market is flooded with people who don't know what they're doing, the value of talented software engineers with a strong grasp of fundamentals should go up, not down. talented developers that can produce high quality work by leveraging AI, and not slop, will be in higher demand than ever before compared to their peers.
there is already strong evidence to support this. even seemingly insigificant tasks can have catastrophic effects if done badly at scale. for example, Cloudflare's dashboard went down a few weeks ago because of bad react code causing a useEffect with an incomplete dependency array to rerender and make API calls that DDOSd their own servers.
the best use of AI is in the hands of a competent developer that can guide it step by step, function by function, to automate steps that lead to an end goal. developers that try to "vibe code" entire projects or even features end to end are bound to run into issues like the ones above. in the right hands, AI can exponentially increase output speed; in the wrong ones, it can make mistakes to even seemingly trivial parts of codebases that can potentially take down services.
i think that more people who have a passion for computer science and technology should be entering the field, not less. the amount of AI slop may be increasing, but so is the opportunity to differentiate yourself and prove technological competency if you can build up strong fundamentals.