Long ago digital calculators did not exist. Instead offices full of humans spent their days doing mathematics on slide rules assisted by charts of logic tables. The invention of the mainframe and eventually the digital pocket calculators eliminated those jobs. Yet today our civilization does more calculation than ever before. It just doesn’t involve humans in offices.
Today we face another cliff. That of the human programmer being replaced by an AI programer. For the last 40 years programming has been done by humans. The work of converting simple product requirements “Make the button blue” have been done by human hands. We don’t need to do that anymore. AI coding tools are quite capable of adjusting buttons for product teams. AI is quite good at writing for loops. AI is quite capable of building an integration with an external AI and plumbing it into the rest of the system. You can just tell it to do those things using english and links of examples.
It’s no longer mandatory that a human write all the code in a system. Going forward I expect we will hit a point where most code is generated by AI quite soon. Humans will still be involved in the process. But writing the code will move into a machine process. Much like how no one works professionally doing multiplication to balance Sear’s books. Machines do that.
The question then is what will humans do? For now the answer is Software Engineering. We may not need to write code. But we are still going to have a lot of software running in production. It’s going to have to be designed, managed and maintained. When the AI gets stuck someone is going to have to dive into the code and figure out what the machines got up to unsupervised. We’re still going to have to create and maintain standards like HTTP.
The problem for the software industry is that most of the work hasn’t been software engineering. Most of the job of most programers to date has been programming. Few got to do actual engineering work in software because writing the code took up so much of the time.
For those of us who got into the industry because programming was fun, this is going to hurt. People who got into software because the money was good and the hours were short are going to have a hard time. We are in a transition period where the programmer is going to disappear as a job. Estimates show there are somewhere between 25-50 million software developers on the planet. In a world where humans do not program we do not need 50 million professional programmers.
What does this mean for the industry? First of all software is going to get a lot cheaper. If your moat is based around other people not creating their own version of your software, you are cooked. What took you $10 million to build before will now take your competition $100k to recreate.
Who is worst off by this transition? The Junior Developer is basically over. There is no reason to hire or train anymore programmers. Today you can communicate to an AI just like you would a junior developer except the AI gets the job done way faster. It’s not a great time to be studying for a Computer Science degree.
Next is actually project and middle managers. Headcounts are going to drop a lot. When you have one hundredth the people working on a project you don’t need as many project managers.
Basically look at your engineering department. 90% of the work anyone with an engineer or programmer title was doing is going to be done by AI. The only people who are going to be sticking around are the technical leadership and product owners. When your group of one hundred is replaced by three people talking to AI, the nature of your organization changes entirely.