What this blog is about

In short: This blog is about how to Software Development evolves with artificial intelligence and the impact on programmers.

There are several hustles today to become a software developer:

To become a successful software developer in the first place, you must be able to code. Be it self-taught, learned in a job, learned via bootcamp or learned by acquiring a degree such as a computer science degree. 

You then must be part of an organization or a business that pays your salary such that you’re able to survive and grow in your profession. It’s not enough to code in your spear time, you need to reach the level of a professional software developer.

Only as a professional software developer you get the chance to learn how to code well and efficient, which are the key ingredients in order to stay in the software business for the long term. 

A software developer has always to compete against the cost of software production (salary) in relation to the revenue produced by the software. Is a software developer inefficient, he or she most likely will have a hard time in the long run, therefor a software developer competes against him or herself in terms of getting better and better. Of course, a software developer also competes against other more efficient or cheaper software developers.

Now, with the rise and popularity of large language models such as GPT 3.5 in 2022, the heat is on for software developers to compete even further with artificial intelligence. It now will not only be enough to be good, efficient and cheap at your profession, but in order to survive in your organization or business, you will need to convince your managers or financial controllers that the ratio of value you generate with your code and the costs you generate (salary) are higher than the ratio of the value of a machine generated code and the costs it generates.

One public observable assumption is that soon the described ratio of the machine is way higher and therefor the end of programming is near. Some say artificial intelligence will end the necessity of programmers in the future and therefor in 2030 you won’t be able to earn money with programming.

Is that true? Does that mean that it doesn’t make sense to start going the path of becoming a junior programmer? And for senior programmers, does it mean that it makes sense the change profession?

In this blog I will summarize and analyze the arguments strengthening the hypothesis that software development, currently done by humans, will be replaced by machines in the future. I then will summarize the counterarguments that strengthen the opposite hypothesis that software development still will be done by humans. In the end I will then weighting up these arguments in order to find out what the right development path for a software developer of the future will be and what he or she must do to beat artificial intelligence!

Let’s have a look at it!