I originally posted an extended version of this post on my blog a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
On March 12th, 2024, the coding world went nuts.
That day, Cognition Labs announced in their Twitter/X account the release of Devin, "the first AI software engineer."
That announcement made the coding world run in circles, screaming in desperation. It also triggered an interesting conversation with a group of colleagues and ex-coworkers.
Here's a summary of how a group of senior engineers viewed Devin and AI in general, and my own predictions for coding in the next 10 years.
If You Think You're Out, You're Out!
We all agreed that Devin and AI in general won't take out jobs yet, but it will change the landscape for sure.
This is when the meme "AI needs well-written and unambiguous requirements, so we're safe" is true.
Our conversation was divided into despair and change.
One part of the group believed that software engineering, as we know it, would disappear in less than 10 years. They expected to see more layoffs and unemployment. They were also planning escape routes away from this industry.
While one part of the group was thinking of escaping routes, the other part believed the world would still need software engineers, at least, to oversee what AI does.
We wondered if AI needs human oversight, what about the working conditions for future software engineers?
- Will they come from developing countries, with an extremely low wage and poor working conditions to fix the "oops" of AI software engineers?
- And if unfortunate software engineers were already under those conditions, wouldn't all future software developers (at least the ones still standing) face the same fate?
The World Will Need a Different Type of Coders
In 2034, knowing programming and coding by itself won't be enough.
We will need to master a business domain or area of expertise and use programming in that context, mainly with AI as a tool.
Rather than being mundane code monkeys, our role will look like Product Managers. The coding part will be automated with AI. We will work more as requirement gatherers and writers and prompt engineers. Soft skills will be even more important than ever. Essentially, we all will be engineering managers overseeing a group of Devin's.
We will see more Renaissance men and women, well-versed in different areas of knowledge, managing different AIs to achieve the goal of entire software teams.
In the meantime, if somebody else writes requirements and we, software engineers, merely translate those requirements into code, we'll be out of business sooner than later.
Voilà! That's how Software Engineering will look like in 2034: more human interaction and business understanding to identify requirements for AI software engineers. No more zero-value tasks like manual testing, code generation, and pointless meetings. Yeah, I'm looking at you, SCRUM daily meetings. AI will handle it all. Hopefully.
Yes, I know! Making predictions about the future is hard.
Read this again in 2034.
Starting out or already on the software engineering journey? Join my free 7-day email course to refactor your coding career and save years and thousands of dollars' worth of career mistakes.
Top comments (0)