The Future of Software Engineering: How Artificial Intelligence Will Shape Our Profession

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the job market for software engineers. While some predict that AI might automate many coding tasks, the reality is that it's increasing the demand for skilled programmers and reshaping their roles.

AI-Driven Demand for Skilled Programmers

AI will not replace programmers; instead, it will augment their capabilities. Developers will focus more on AI integration, complex problem-solving, and system optimization. As repetitive coding tasks are handled by AI, programmers will be able to concentrate on more challenging and innovative tasks. The need for skills in machine learning, data science, and AI development will grow, making programmers even more crucial for driving innovation and maintaining AI-driven systems.

While AI can automate many routine tasks, it still requires human intervention to ensure that the systems are reliable and safe. The [H2] importance of human technical expertise will continue to grow. These experts will be needed to assess AI-generated code, implement failsafes, and prevent potential risks.

End of Human Code Writers, Beginnings of AI-Generated Software

AI has the potential to automate the work of human coders, but whether this will happen on a large scale remains to be seen. In the foreseeable future, AI is still far from being able to improve itself, fix itself, and ensure that its outputs are safe and beneficial for humans. Therefore, there will always be a need for human oversight and expertise in the development and maintenance of AI systems.

Addressing AI-Generated Bugs

The rise of AI-generated software will also lead to a need for more programmers to find and fix bugs in this software. I test AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini regularly to see how they perform in solving programming exercises, and so far, neither has been able to provide correct solutions to even the simplest problems I set.

My observations suggest that AI is not capable of learning from its own experiences or improving its performance over time. This raises concerns about the reliability of AI-generated software. The world will need more intelligent, organic problem solvers rather than less reliable AI systems.

Intuition and Future Projections

Despite a lack of crystal balls, my intuition is that AI will likely lead to an increase in demand for programmers to fix the bugs in AI-generated software. There are two main reasons for this:

Smarter programmers tend to produce more sophisticated and harder-to-find bugs than average programmers. AI-generated software is likely to be full of these more complex bugs. So far, AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini have repeatedly failed to solve even basic programming exercises. Their performance has not improved over time, which suggests that they are not capable of learning or improving.

While AI may eventually reach the level of human programmers, I seriously doubt that I will see that day in my lifetime. It is highly unlikely that AI will produce a high-quality, high-performance, highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and real-time distributed operating system anytime soon.