Last year was marked by astonishing advancements in AI, in particular in regards to software development. More and more I get the feeling that the way we build software is fundamentally changing.
Traditionally, software has been expensive to produce, with expense driven largely by the labour costs of a highly skilled and specialised workforce. This workforce has also constituted a bottleneck for the possible scale of production, making software a valuable commodity to produce effectively. The rise of industrial software - Chris Loy
But with these new models we are moving towards a economic reality where disposable software generated by AI is good enough for many cases.
Being a software developer for while, you get a feeling of how much time it would take to build a specific app or feature. It's of course hard to say it with a high accuracy, one of the traditional problems of software development, but you get a ballpark feeling pretty well.
These new models have fundamentally disrupted this feeling. What would have taken a week to build can be built in mere hours now. Right now this is a world that is almost exclusively accessible for software developers, but I have no doubt that this will open up in 2026 and be accessible for everyone else as well.
And I for one think that is a great thing. A disruption in the space of software development is long overdue. In the end, for me, programming was always just a way to achieve something, not a purpose in itself and I say that as someone taking great pride in writing good software.
So if code gets commoditized and everybody can create programs at their own whim, where do we need to shift our attention to? What does the software engineer of the future do?