Future of Software Development in the AI World

In summary, the below image depicts the future of software engineering. Iron Man never wrote any code but only provided instructions to Jarvis.

Software developers are responsible for designing, building, testing, and maintaining software applications. These responsibilities would remain the same but companies would need fewer people to handle huge software products.

As the adoption of IDE like Github Copilot increases, the interview criteria would also start to change. You should be good at prompt engineering and training AI machines.

Better Problem solving skills would be appreciated over coding skills as code would be readily available.

Sooner or later, programming language would come with support of prompt engineering to generate proficient code.

If I have broken down the impact on Software Developers of AI, it would be in three stages :

Stage 1: Adoption of Prompt Engineering: In the first stage of AI adoption, it would be limited to converting the business requirement into a set of instructions for machines.

Stage 2: Understanding of Domain Knowledge: In this stage, the machine would have some ideas about your business domain and would reinforce knowledge based on the correction made by humans in code.

Stage 3: Product Developers as new role: Generation of code based on the clarity of the product documentation and understanding of problems.

Doubt me, look at character.ai, wonder dynamic, etc which can be used to create movies by one single person.

A decade later, In a perfect AI world

A good product requirement document should be sufficient to build a great product.

maintenance

Production maintenance which impacts business continuity would be limited monitoring of resources (as cost is involved) or in disaster recovery situations.

Good Instructions over coding. Training machine would be a routine job.

More or less everything I wrote above is not uncertain and likely to happen in a phased manner. We need to accept this as reality and look forward to working with machines in collaboration. Writing code would no more be fun people. Start adopting tools like Github CoPilot and GPT-based tools for your advantage.

In a few years as the adoption of AI rises, you would soon see a lot of AI companies popping up and overall many engineering tasks would be concluded by AI.

These are the few companies started by Ex employees of OpenAI.