As GenAI’s capabilities improve, how much do you predict it will change the role of software developers / engineers? What role do you think devs and engineers will primarily play in the next 5 years?
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Director of IT4 months ago
While GenAI is a great accelerator for software development and engineering, humans will still be needed for the forseeable future to take the 80% that GenAI provides and bring the projects to completion. In addition to the remaining 20%, There will also be compliance and peer reviews needed. If everyone has access to GenAI, it will only be the developer/engineer's specific knowledge, not in the data pool, that would provide differentiation between similar applications and engineering designs. Director of IT4 months ago
GenAI has become a mainstay in the software development landscape, significantly influencing the roles of developers and engineers. Presently, GenAI is capable of executing various coding tasks, such as generating new code and unit tests, aiding in code remediation, and evaluating security vulnerabilities. Despite the advancements in GenAI tools, a human review remains a critical and obligatory step, as emphasized by the disclaimers accompanying the output of these tools. Such disclaimers highlight the necessity of having prior knowledge of the relevant platform or programming language, which is expected to remain the case in the foreseeable future.The future of the developer’s role, given the swift progress in this domain, remains uncertain. Matt Walsh, in his ACM talk last year, proposed a radical future where traditional programming could become obsolete. However, I believe that such a transformation will require more than five years to materialize. Until then, core programming skills are likely to retain their value and demand in the industry.
Director of Information Security in Services (non-Government)4 months ago
I think it will not have an impact on the workforce. Developers will need to adapt to using GenAI and use it as a tool. I'm on the other hand convinced that developers not using GenAI will be replaced by developers who do. It will help them write more lines of code in a smaller amount of time. I don't believe in GenAI writing full programs more replacing the fact that developers now spend time searching code snippets on various community sites like sourceforge. Keeping the code readable and understandable for the main developer as well as future new developers will remain a challenge. I was personally also impressed on the ability to generate code comments and documentation. Something most developers see as unpleasant time consuming tasks. Now it will become just verifying the generated documentation and correct it. All together it will improve the overall task of a developer in the end.