PREDICTION: AI Will Trigger an Explosion of New Software Developers

Lots of workers will be displaced by AI. But many will become software engineers. Some won't even know they've become skilled engineers.

Since everyday written words are now officially “code”, it can be said that everyone is an engineer. When someone introduces themself as a prompt engineer, the comeback is - aren’t we all?

Practically, though, skills are needed to build valuable prompts, and this is especially true for commercial-grade AI solutions. Despite the massive recent layoffs in big tech, the demand for software developers will continue to exceed supply. Indeed, we’re entering a tech phase where we will build solutions a little differently. But we will also develop more solutions to address previously impractical ideas. That’s the part we all miss.

Generative AI made possible apps that were inconceivable just 12 months ago. It has unearthed visions of future solutions that were financially impractical until this year. The explosion in software development will be fueled by a demand that is invisible today, but obvious in a few years.

As Kevin Xu said -

There are way more technologies that ought to be built that aren’t.

Just a few brief years ago - 2017, as I recall - experts proclaimed the #no-code revolution would eat the software industry leaving it in a pile of rubble in just five years. They were wrong.

What’s the first thing Airtable did when it started to get serious traction in 2019? It added code. Javascript was the new big thing, and it made it possible to do many complex things that could not be achieved in a pure no-code platform. So now, Airtable is unashamedly a #no/low-code platform.

The irony of Airtable’s no-code lineage does not escape me. It offers three ways to use code and likely more on the way.

When they add AI features, it will be the first of many #no-thinking platforms¹, but that’s a story for another time.

Four Reasons More Developers Are Joining the Workforce

Future application complexity is at the center of the future of software development. These four elements will serve as the key drivers in the next five years and possibly beyond.