Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?
That’s wildly optimistic. If I recall correctly, early studies are showing the 51% of participants who saw any improvement, reported an average of a 20% improvement.
Even granting that optimism, since 5% of all software projects are on time and within budget, we may look forward to a whopping leap to 7.5 out of every hundred software projects arriving on time and under budget, in a best case scenario.
The hard truth no one wants to talk about is that the average software development team is awful.
This glorified parrot tool of LLMs is one of the coolest we have seen in awhile, but it’s not going to materially fix the awful state of the field of software development.
The average software development team doesn’t understand how to deliver high quality maintainable solitions on a reasonable timeline.
AI may mildly improve the delivery timelines of the still very incorrect and over-budget solutions delivered by the average development team.