I’m a big fan of AI - well, that’s kind of obvious, but for those who don’t know me enough, I’ve been working with data, AI and software engineering for the past 9 years in multiple companies and economical sectors - and since there is plenty of people with alarming messages about a drastic decay of the software engineering career, I want to give my point of view in this matter based on what I’m noticing in the software engineering market landscape.

Software engineering is going to change - A LOT!

This is another obvious point, software engineering is going to change, we are not going to write more code, we will probably right less and less code along the time and become way more productive with our machine inputs, but we are still going to input some data into the machine.

Is this input the same as today’s prompts for GPT-like models? I really don’t know, maybe we will send pictures of paper drawings and the AI will automatically code the page and functionalities described, maybe we are going to describe more technical specifications and the AI will figure things out. I really don’t know, models are evolving rapidly and becoming more powerful.

One thing is very clear to me: there is no way we aren’t going to change the way we code. Probably we will write more human-linguistic-like coding instructions instead of writing the code itself, or maybe we are just going to point the features we want and the AI will code itself the whole back-end and front-end structure.

Our Profession will change a lot

Right now, the adoption of AIs in IDEs is ramping up, but not everyone is using it yet (there are plenty of hardcore vim, nano and emacs users who won’t give up using the text editor without the copilot).

I’m my perspective and from what I’ve tested so far, we can gain a 2x faster delivery speed because we can code faster the feature, the problem is that we need to instruct the computer very clearly and step by step what should be done, so we can get a crystal clear output that solves our problem.

Developers who refuse to look into AI IDEs are going to lose competitive advantage on the market (I like coding by myself without the IDE when I’m writing open source or hobby software, not commercial grade ones).

Sahil Lavingia said in a tweet that hiring Jr and Mid level software engineers is no longer needed for all of his companies because the code size is already possible to be processed by the most modern LLMs context window.

In the near future every engineer will become a product person, someone who needs to understand why they are doing what they are doing and how it affects the economics of the company they are working for/creating.

Avelino has a definition for this kind of person who is an engineer and has product-focus: a product engineer. His definition of this is the statement:

a product engineer is someone who seeks to understand the user and pain points. They are passionate in using tech to solve problems and know how to apply it on the problem in the short, medium and long term, starting simple and connected with the long term strategy.

I like his point of view and that’s where I’m steering my career to and that’s what I think the future of software engineering is heading to. What are your thoughts on this? Share this post and your thoughts on this!