The US Government seems to think AI won’t replace software engineers. Are they right?

Digging deeper into the BLS Data, it seems like the “Job Outlook” for 2024–34 will be 15%, which is “Much faster than average”.

While I am quite certain that commercially available LLMs that exist in the market today are in no way capable of replacing a solid senior-level engineer, I am less confident in these job growth numbers.

For starters, as I write this in March of 2026, those numbers seem to be based on 2024.

Second, I found a conflicting or possibly revised report on the same website from Aug 2025 that puts the 10 year growth projection numbers closer to 6.5% to 7.5%, but that groups SWE jobs in with a few other areas.

And if that wasn’t enough, I found I could easily trigger a 500 error on the BLS website simply by omitting a query string var.

Not that the error reflects on the quality of data, but you would think with the amount of tax dollars that go into the BLS, they would know how to return a 400 status code when appropriate.

What do I think? I think software engineering will look very different in 10 years. New jobs will emerge that we couldn’t have imagined. It will be like what a “Mobile App Developer” would look like to someone in the 80s/90s.

Where do you think the Software Engineering field will be in 10 years?