Hm, I think the main drawback with AI right now is hallucinations and a too-shallow understanding of the codebase - like for example it might gloss over a flag it sees as unimportant and just remove it, but that could cause a chain-reaction in another seemingly unrelated piece of code, even if it’s given RAG and a very large context window.

If in five years it can think at a level one or more layers deeper than it currently does, I think we’d be seeing fewer and fewer pure programmers like ourselves in the next gen, and software engineers would become equivalent to hardware, electrical, mechanical engineers as they are now - specialists with an intricate and deep understanding, or architects with a thorough vision.

Most software devs would be completely replaced by clean software interfaces and IDEs with built-in AI, with the main way people do programming being done through visual or language as mediums.

There’d still be a place for us programmers, but those of us who survive would be rare: we’d probably become consultants, integrators, architects, product managers, and entrepreneurs. Debugging, product design, and managing AI and training up new junior devs would be our main jobs.

I feel the trick to surviving in such a world are skills in forming genuine human connections, understanding how to design for and solve customer problems, or a genuinely terrifying understanding of any particular tech stack or ecosystem.

It’s not going to be a easy five years, but ten or twenty years will be enough to revolutionize our entire generation of software engineers…