Will I lose my job because of GenAI?

Will I lose my job soon? Will my job be replaced by GenAI Agents?

Many developers (and other professionals) might have that question in mind today.

To be honest, I don't have the answer to these questions, but that sounds really weird to me when I hear or read that software developers have no future.

I believe that depends on how we define the developer job.

Of course, if you are the kind of developer who expects to be given the input and the output of a function and only writes the code inside it...you are dead!

But, I hope a large majority of developers do more than that today!!!

If not, they will have to augment their skills. And the good news is that GenAI will help them learn faster!

Then, maybe, we should stop talking about developers, but software architects or software engineers (who should have coding skills of course - but not only).

This diagram illustrates this evolution, where developers become software architects / engineers, building more complex applications.

Now let's say that a job can be threatened when someone has the choice between asking to a human (slow and expensive) compared to asking to an AI Agent (cheap and fast).

Therefore, can we replace a software engineers with GenAI Agents?

Again I don't have a definitive answer, but my gut feeling is that it will be difficult for COMPLEX applications, which is more and more the norm in many companies.

Maybe, I'll be worried the day when all companies around the world will have all the same infrastructure, all the same programming language, all the same database engine, all the same application framework, ...

But this is not the trend I see.

Applications require more and more sophistication: Event Driven Architecture, Distributed Databases, Micro-Services, Data Lakes, etc...

Why?

I think because the purpose of a company is to create value (i.e. improve their customer's life) and differentiate from their competitors.

And the more you want to create value with software, the more you need it to be sophisticated behind the scenes.

Also, building GenAI agents for our customers will not simplify systems, I actually feel the opposite!

Therefore I'm quite optimistic for software engineers in the future 😊

I hope sharing this will help people 😊