AI Is Changing Software Engineering, and Everyone Is Pretending They Know What Happens Next

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Writing Code

There is no sugar coating it. If you worked as a software developer at any point for longer than three years, you know how much of a game changer AI has been in writing code. Given the right instructions, it writes code surprisingly well. It generates code at a speed that has never been seen before, and the code is often pretty neat. But that is exactly where the confusion starts, because the question is no longer whether AI can write code. It clearly can. The question is what this means for software engineering as a whole.

This is not really an article about whether AI can write code. It is about what happens to software engineering when code becomes much easier to generate than it used to be.

However, many questions arise from this. What does this mean for software developers? Should we still review every single line of code generated by AI? Should we rethink the whole workflow, maybe through something like spec-driven development? How much more productive can we realistically become? 2X, 5X, 1000X? I’ve heard many theories. Will this make everyone into a developer…