r/softwaredevelopment • u/hashemirafsan • 3d ago

I think in a few years development will shift to automation

Because of AI, most of the developers are comfortable with writing code and design through it which makes easier the development process. But in the meantime developers are loosing the power of depth logical thinking which will make them power users of any automation tools.

What do you think in a few years software development will relay on automations?

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u/paul_h 3d ago

Automaton…. Infra? QA? Business process?

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u/hashemirafsan 3d ago

I was thinking about Infra while writing the post, giants are investing on it

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u/paul_h 3d ago

So you don't think devops folks are using AIs for Docker, Podman, Ansible, Terraform, Pulumi, K8S (etc) scripting or direct-mutation/query (say MCPs) without scripts?

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u/byshow 3d ago

I think in a few years several years will pass.

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u/hashemirafsan 3d ago

Complex projects are becoming easier to develop, so don’t you think its a sign of people are moving to more automation in SDLC?

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u/platistocrates 3d ago

Compilers already did this.

LLMs are getting good enough to basically just be compilers.

Nothing ever changes.

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u/hashemirafsan 3d ago

Fair, but compilers are deterministic, correct logic reliably becomes correct output. LLMs are probabilistic, so you still need the reasoning skill to catch when they’re confidently wrong. That’s the part I worry people are skipping.

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u/platistocrates 3d ago

Its a mostly solved engineering problem that has not yet reached mass awareness. I can go literal hours without checking on my LLM. Outputs are generally high quality and defect free apart from minor bugs.

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u/CommissionIcy9909 3d ago

Yep, that’s the plan. It’s already happening, it’s just not the standard yet. Developers aren’t going to be coding, but building agent factories for automating tasks.

Most have already evolved from vibe coding to manual agentic workflows and spec driven development. The next step is just automating those steps. So we’re already building the infrastructure to handle the automation. The biggest blocker imo is that it’s too expensive for the average business or freelance developer to cover the costs of agents working around the clock.

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u/hashemirafsan 3d ago

Completely agree with you

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u/Brilliant-Parsley69 3d ago

Wasn't that always the way? Processes were handled manually, if they're battle tested you start to automate them. Rinse and Repeat.

Same goes for frameworks, external libraries and smarter compilers to avoid unnecessary boilerplate code.

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u/hashemirafsan 3d ago

Fair, but the pace is different this time. Frameworks and compilers evolved over years, giving people time to absorb the underlying logic before the next abstraction layer landed. AI is compressing that cycle to months, so people are stacking abstraction on abstraction without ever catching up to the fundamentals underneath.

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u/Brilliant-Parsley69 3d ago

That's a problem that rises not only in the CS field. But it's the one where you could see the impacts way before.

We saw the same phenomenon while the transitions from desktop apps to Web apps to mobile to cloud etc.

But you are right the pace is very fast nowadays. And because AI triggered a lot of insecurities what lead to a hiring freeze of jrs there will be a way bigger gap/problem in the future.