Where Is Software Development Going?

Give a watch to this interesting panel, including Martin Fowler "Pioneer of Various Topics around Object-Oriented Technology & Agile Methods". They touch on a few great thought-leader-ish topics, like LLMs, quantum computing, and writing books. As always, I'm tuned in most attentively to the AI discussion.

There's a vague sense of agreement that even with AI software development will still be around in the future, but some interesting nuances within. Holly Cummins says "If you ask a software developer in 20 years, they'll still say people are annoying and everyone does it wrong" - I know enough developers to know that if development exists in 20 years, Holly will be right. Fowler agrees but notes that the kinds of things we do as programmers will change. Even now, generative AI tools are good at coming up with first drafts and ideas, and can do great things for codebase understanding (combined with ASTs and knowledge graphs).

Two other panelists' quotes capture my mind. Trisha Gee isn't worried about LLMs/AI, as she says "The real work of programming is thinking." Daniel Terhorst-North is OK with LLMs/AI providing better tools: "now we have tools helping me do lifting, so that I can do thinking!" In principle, these are great positions! I would love a world where my most important task was to think, and AI carried out my every ask immediately!

But what if the best way to do that was to create machines that also do the thinking? Of what economic value (note that I'm qualifying value with "economic" here) are we workers, if machines do the things we do more cheaply? I’m not claiming that current ChatGPT or Claude models can think like we can. I'm simultaneously not claiming that it's impossible for them to do so in the future. PM