Software engineering will never fully disappear as a field, but we’re on the cusp of a vast permanent contraction of the workforce.
I’ve been a professional software developer for eighteen years. In that time, one of the things I’ve learned is that unremarkable code is good code. As is following industry standards. Doing both reduces cognitive complexity which mitigates bugs, as well as eases onboarding and refactoring.
In other words, exactly what AI is good at: being derivative.
Another lesson is that it’s more productive not to reinvent the wheel, but only write what doesn’t yet exist: mostly glue code. Everything we do is to realise new features for a product faster and cheaper than competitors.
That’s everything for market capture. Consumers don’t reward reliable products; because higher-quality means fewer features, higher cost, or taking longer. They instead spend their money on the product that has the features they want in a state that’s good enough today. Those of us who want bullet-proof products are in the minority.
In this ecosystem, consumers tolerate outages because the competitors are either more pricey, or lack the features. Those companies that do enjoy this exclusivity can then leverage their position to take more shortcuts around quality – thus allowing for more features faster.
This incentive structure makes AI’s major current downside, low-quality code, a non-issue. That slop still amounts to more features.
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