AI Won't Take Our Coding Jobs Yet. But The World Will Need Different Coders

29 Apr 2024 #career

On March 12th, 2024, the coding world went nuts.

That day, Cognition Labs announced in their Twitter/X account the release of Devin, “the first AI software engineer.”

That announcement made the coding world run in circles, screaming in desperation. It also triggered an interesting conversation with a group of colleagues and ex-coworkers.

Here’s a summary of how a group of senior engineers viewed Devin and AI in general, and my own predictions for coding in the next 10 years.

If You Think You’re Out, You’re Out!

We all agreed that Devin and AI in general won’t take out jobs yet, but it will change the landscape for sure.

This is when the meme “AI needs well-written and unambiguous requirements, so we’re safe” is true.

One part of the group believed that software engineering, as we know it, would disappear in less than 10 years. They expected to see more layoffs and unemployment. They were also planning escape routes away from this industry.

If you’re reading this from the future, a bit of context about layoffs:

Around the 2020 pandemic, we enjoyed a boom in employment. We only needed “software engineer” as the title in our LinkedIn profiles to have dozens of recruiters offering “life-changing opportunities” every week.

But, in 2023 and 2024, we experienced massive layoffs. Either we were laid off or knew someone in our inner circle who was. It was a crazy time: one job listing, hundreds of applicants, and radio silence after sending a CV.

Most people claimed that AI took those jobs. Others claimed tech companies were so used to free money that went crazy hiring and then, when money wasn’t free anymore, they went crazy firing too. In any case, it was hard to get a new job in that season of layoffs.

Ok, end of that detour and back to the AI story.

While one part of the group was thinking of escaping routes, the other part believed the world would still need software engineers, at least, to oversee what AI does.

We wondered if AI needs human oversight, what about the working conditions for future software engineers? Maybe will they come from developing countries, with an extremely low wage and poor working conditions to fix the “oops” of AI software engineers? And if unfortunate software engineers were already under those conditions, wouldn’t all future software developers (at least the ones still standing) face the same fate?

Our conversation was divided into despair and change.

The World Will Need a Different Type of Coders

In 2034, knowing programming and coding by itself won’t be enough.

We will need to master a business domain or area of expertise and use programming in that context, mainly with AI as a tool.

Rather than being mundane code monkeys, our role will look like Product Managers. The coding part will be automated with AI. We will work more as requirement gatherers and writers and prompt engineers. Soft skills will be even more important than ever. Essentially, we all will be engineering managers overseeing a group of Devin’s.

We will see more Renaissance men and women, well-versed in different areas of knowledge, managing different AIs to achieve the goal of entire software teams.

In the meantime, if somebody else writes requirements and we, software engineers, merely translate those requirements into code, we’ll be out of business sooner rather than later.

Voilà! That’s how Software Engineering will look like in 2034: more human interaction and business understanding to identify requirements for AI software engineers. No more zero-value tasks like manual testing, code generation, and pointless meetings. Yeah, I’m looking at you, SCRUM daily meetings. AI will handle it all. Hopefully.

This is what Programming was like in 2020 and how I used AI to launch my courses in 2024.

Yes, I know! Making predictions about the future is hard.

“Open in 2034”