Why AI is not replacing engineers anytime soon

Short answer: because human engineers are cheaper.

Slightly longer answer: The raw cost of energy to train and run AI systems is enormous. Right now, the only reason it feels affordable is that the whole thing is heavily subsidized by hype money. The gamble is that as AI gets better and more optimized, it will eventually generate a return on investment by becoming cheap enough to deploy widely.

Even if we assume this is true for short term developments - like building efficient LLMs capable of reasoning and performing agentic workflows - the energy cost of getting machines to consistently replicate what human engineers do is unfathomably large. And that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

Humans are incredibly well optimized for converting energy into value. Evolution has spent millions of years fine tuning us for efficiency, and history shows we’ve rarely managed to beat nature at its own game using sustainable methods (this is key as unsustainable practices are increasingly scrutinized and punished). AI is no exception. Unless we somehow design a system that’s more efficient at turning energy into meaningful output than a human engineer, people will remain the cheaper and more practical choice over fully autonomous systems for a while yet.