Recently, I noticed many people are worried that AI will take over all jobs, including software engineering. But Naval Ravikant from AngelList has an interesting perspective on this—he believes these fears might be exaggerated.

So why are software engineers still relevant? First, they think in code. This is no small matter. When AI writes code for you (like Claude Code or similar tools), it will always make mistakes. There are bugs, imperfect architecture, performance issues. People who understand basic logic can quickly spot these problems and fix them. If you want to build applications with solid structure, high performance, and good error handling, you still need someone who truly understands software engineering.

Second, many problems are still beyond AI’s reach. AI can handle tasks that have thousands of examples in its data—like sorting or list operations. But if you want to write code with extremely high performance, implement it in new architecture, or solve genuinely new problems, you still need to be hands-on. This will continue until there is enough training data or until AI can perform better abstract-level reasoning.

But this isn’t just about AI and software. The bigger principle is: the market only wants the best. If there’s a superior application in a certain segment, who wants mediocrity? So the bad news is, being second or third doesn’t matter. The good news is, the fields where you can become the best are unlimited. You can keep redefining what you do until you become an expert in a subfield.

So if you master a field and become a leading expert there, don’t worry about AI replacing you. This principle still applies in the AI era. The world needs people who truly know what they’re doing, not just the average.