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Olufisayo Bamidele
Olufisayo Bamidele

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Future of Software Engineering: Is Maintainability Still Important?

I recently stumbled upon a YouTube talk by an AI salesman that got me thinking about the future of Software Engineering as a Profession. The speaker said something along the line of "maintainable code for humans". I mean, I have always known that but this time, it got me thinking – all those acronyms we toss around like confetti (DRY, WET, YAGNI, SOLID) are essentially for us. When it comes down to CPUs, all they see is bits and bytes.

Today's programming language, tomorrow's joke.

At the end, today's bleeding edge is tomorrow's legacy;

So, what if the programming language of tomorrow are not lines of code but Natural Language

Note that not long ago, any serious software had to be written in Assembly. Fast forward to today, compilers had become better at generating Assembly code than most programmers. I mean, I can't remember the last time I had to inspect the byte code generated by the V8 engine due to a pesky bug.

So, I ask again, if AI generated code gets better and it starts working 99.9% of the time, of what use is maintainability?

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