Are Developers Becoming Obsolete?
Software engineers who crank out code for mobile and web apps are watching their relevance slip away. Their future now hangs by a thread, getting bleaker with each passing day and urging them to upskill more than ever.
Simply put, traditional software engineers are now living in the developer era.?
Alarmingly, the barrier to entry for a developer is dropping every day. The most recent phenomenon that’s got everyone talking is Anysphere’s Cursor coding tool, which has basically turned everyone into a developer. And now, there are more tools coming up in the same category, such as Codeium, Magic, and Zed AI, all trying to make the same formula work.?
Graduating out of colleges with computer science degrees in a world to compete with the people who are becoming software engineers using AI tools, the turmoil of an average software engineer is real.
The solution is easier said than done – upskill yourselves and focus on higher order things such as building foundational AI. Even eight-year-olds are building apps using Cursor AI in 45 minutes.?
Since there is no barrier to entry, no degree requirements, and no regulations about who can join the market, software engineering has become just about anyone’s game – something that has not happened to many professions in the history of jobs.?
Meanwhile, there are plenty of opportunities for developers to upskill.
But “upskill to what?” is what people ask.?
The conversation from LLMs to SLMs to coding assistants to AI agents keeps changing so swiftly that it can be challenging to determine which new skills are worth acquiring. This question reflects a broader uncertainty about how to prioritise learning in a field where the next big thing seems just around the corner.
Should you panic? Francois Chollet, the creator of Keras, said a few months ago: “There will be more software engineers (the kind that write code, e.g. Python, C or JavaScript code) in five years than there are today.” He added that the estimated number of professional software engineers today is 26 million, which would jump to 30-35 million in five years.
This is because developers who are proficient with coding without code generators can never be replaced. People who built programming languages and foundational tools are still very well versed in coding than people who are just using Cursor and alike to build apps. Sure, there can be an abundance of people building apps in the future, but the scope would just be limited to that.
Meanwhile, highly skilled 10x developers would be focusing on leveraging such tools, or possibly finding flaws in them, to create even better software. So to say, creating the next Cursor, or maybe even ChatGPT-like platform for coding.
There is an abundance of things that can be done. For instance, focusing on enhancing hardware or building infrastructure for running future workloads can only be comprehended by experts in the field. Companies like Pipeshift AI, Groq, and Jarvis Labs are some of the examples of those working on problems other than coding.?
The truth is that such AI tools can never replace human intelligence or jobs, only augment them. “Generating working code is only a part of the responsibility,” said VJ’s Insights in a post on X. Though, “if you are someone who just writes code, you need to start thinking differently.”
So, is the future leaving coders behind? In the near future, there are predictions that software engineering would become all about managing a team of AI agent engineers, and telling them how to code. This will make every engineer akin to an engineering manager, delegating basic tasks to coding agents while focusing on higher-level aspects such as understanding requirements, architecting systems, and deciding what to build.
Ergo, it is high time that software engineers start upskilling themselves, and currently, it looks like using generative AI tools is the best way forward. Who knows, you might also become a solo-entrepreneur building a billion-dollar company alone.?
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2 周Reads like a well thought-out write up and offers a wee bit of whimsical prophecy as well . Sadly a fictional bit far from the grounded reality . Bit out of touch with the real world as many DS have moved into coding of late in a year or so coz that's the bread and butter of everything. Talking about AI without substance is a fad nowadays and it seems it's the next social media phenomena already.