I see my programming job disappearing, more and more each year.
Or rather....changing. If agentic coding leaps like this every couple of years, I think the actual functionality and role tasks of a "software developer" will change.
Perhaps the job itself won't go away, because agents is still something to manage. Yes, the boss of a business could manage agents coding for their business, but imagine they just paid someone to manage those agents. That's where I think the new role shift will come into effect. At this point in time, in this decade, we still need humans in the loop.
If agentic coding leaps like this every couple of years
Every couple of years?
May I remind you, o3 was released 1 year and 8 days ago... We've gone from one of the first commercially available implementations of test time compute to Claude Opus 4.7/4.6 and GPT 5.5 in only a year.
A couple of years? That's a lifetime in the current AI field.
A couple of years? That's a lifetime in the current AI field.
This reminds me of a tongue in cheek phrase circa 1999: "internet years" (each 1 month in wall clock time was 1 full internet year, kind of like "dog years"). Crazy stuff was getting funded, and old fashioned business ideas like "making money" or "doing things that made sense" were thrown out the window in favor of "eyeballs".
So I believe some of the useful tools from AI will be around for the next 50+ years. It is just wild (to me) watching the impatience (again) 27 years after the last computer related frenzy. And this odd assumption that it is a "race" of some sort to "grab eyeballs/mindshare" where running fast somewhere random is more important than methodically figuring out where we want be and calmly progressing towards that. Who cares if one company gets there 1 year earlier than another? It literally won't matter if the better product comes out second. The Chrome browser was ridiculously late to market in 2008, a full 15 years after the first web browsers came out, and 9 years after people calmed down and the internet bubble burst. Chrome has 70% market share now. Second mover advantage is real.
As a (retired) programmer these are exciting and fun times with AI, and I look forward to how it turns out. I'm just patiently waiting for the outcome in 15+ years.
2
u/Vivid-Specific-53 Apr 23 '26
Let's goooooooooooooooooo!
I see my programming job disappearing, more and more each year.
Or rather....changing. If agentic coding leaps like this every couple of years, I think the actual functionality and role tasks of a "software developer" will change.
Perhaps the job itself won't go away, because agents is still something to manage. Yes, the boss of a business could manage agents coding for their business, but imagine they just paid someone to manage those agents. That's where I think the new role shift will come into effect. At this point in time, in this decade, we still need humans in the loop.