Someone in the AI coding space recently said that the term "software engineer" will be obsolete, and we will all be "builders" or "product managers" instead, as coding is solving itself around the corner. I have come across some instances of this before. Instead of anything else, it was the way people delivered this bit of news that pulled at me this time. Not "this year, possibly", but this year, "obviously. The sound of that is new, even though their prediction isn't.
Having been here before, many times, and not in the way that people would like.
The pattern, if you actually look at it
Routers and IDEs arrived decades ago, promising to enable software development five to ten times faster, and at the time they were running, people were afraid because fewer people would have to do the same amount of work. The actual result was quite the opposite. The software became infinitely easier to develop, and the number of software programs the world wanted grew exponentially, as did the number of developers required to develop them. Ten years later, Stack Overflow and Open Source did the same, and it was rightfully assumed that one's personal knowledge was devalued by the ease of access to others who had solved the same problem. It did the opposite: it lowered the bar, and more people became developers, not fewer. That friction turned developers' jobs into about double the workload, as cloud platforms took on much of the tedious work of managing their own infrastructure, and there was no more racking servers in the 2010s. Even low-code and no-code systems, which the movement's adherents originally envisioned as giving non-programmers a complete pass with code blocks and no coding whatsoever, found themselves in many markets being paid more than non-programmers who didn't use low-code or no-code systems.
Each and every wave automated something true. Each individual wave saw an increase in the number of people doing the work, rather than a decrease. If that's the whole story, this should be an easy, comforting article to write.
Why people believe this time is actually different
Here's the honest complication, and I don't think it's nothing. All previous waves made you more efficient in doing the work, in typing, in looking things up, in provisioning, and in prototyping. All the previous waves have made you more efficient at work, typing, looking things up, provisioning, and prototyping. None of them spoke to the 'what' or the 'whether' a decision was the correct one. The agent who takes care of the entire lifecycle of building, selecting the architecture, coding, testing, compiling, and deployment of the features is automating another layer altogether. It's no longer eliminating friction from the job, but it's claiming judgment from the job, the part that's been completely avoided by all previous waves.
Which is what makes this one feel different in the body and on the headline. And the fear does have some early confirmation: hiring of junior developers has gotten a lot softer in the last year, while the demand for engineering talent hasn't budged an inch. That's nothing. Prior waves stimulated demand in all areas. It may be a new upswing of senior judgment, and an unspoken decline in the entry level which sustained it.
So which is it
This is as far as I end up; maybe I am incorrect: I believe that the trend is true at the top and downplays at the bottom. Historically, software has become easier to make. That means the world will make more, not less, of it, and more people will make software projects more easily than before. It also means there will be a greater need for more people to easily make software projects. This time, however, the typical entry-level job, the position at the bottom where they teach you the underlying basics over years of bored, technical, under-the-hood cruddy work with a senior engineer’s shadow, may still fall victim to the changes, though not because the number of developers is being reduced, but because the route into being one changes.
I'm looking for your feedback on that. As a fresh entry into the workforce now, does this seem exactly what you're seeing when you go on job interviews, or is it sounding like too much? Or if you are in that self-same fear that you ever endured yourself, do you truly sense that this one is different in this 10th year's fashion? I'd prefer to have this argument in the comments rather than know the response already.
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