| I'm going to go against the grain and say that AI could feasibly replace a very large percentage of most development teams, even today. Not because the AI itself could do all of the coding with no developers at all in the room, but the developers who do know how to use it effectively could output so much more than those who don't that they would more than make up for their lost productivity. Lots of companies have not yet fully embraced AI, and their developers are actually held back by not having access to it as a tool. But as someone who was recently given full access to sophisticated AI tooling, it makes a massive difference in my productivity. Lots of people don't like to hear this, but if you are not using AI today in some capacity, or your company is lagging in its adoption your career is at risk, especially if you are still relatively young. This said as somebody who originally was a massive AI skeptic, but decided to give it a shot. Yes, you still need to know how to code. That is not going away. But there will come a time when you yourself write an order of magnitude less code than you do today because you will become more of a reviewer than a developer yourself. Software development as a role will still exist, because in essence our job is to solve problems and build software, it just happens to be we write a lot of code to do that nowadays. But we will reach a breaking point where we don't write much of the code ourselves at all, maybe just some edits, and we review orders of magnitude than we do today. |
In fact, most of my coding happens in an unfocused state. It's when I'm reading code (when there's a gap in the docs), learning a new system (libraries, platform, language), or designing a system (architecture, integration,...) that I give my full attention. The actual writing is mostly Edit/(Compile|Lint|Test)/Fix cycle that actually goes pretty fast in term of iteration and don't use that much mental energy.