DeutschA few months ago Marmelab CEO Francois Zaninotto wrote this interesting piece on The Bright Future of Developers in the age of AI and the rise of natural language developers.
In this article, Francois outlines how generative AI has changed (and is still changing) software development – and coding in particular – for good by introducing a new abstraction level for programming: natural language.
He goes on to explain that, like with previous iterations, while this new abstraction level frees developers from lower-level problems allowing them to focus on more important higher-level problems it also introduces new challenges and required skills.
In this new age of AI-driven and AI-augmented software development some of those new – or rather once more newly relevant – skills include specification design, test-driven development (TDD) and behaviour-driven development (BDD).
Generative AI certainly doesn’t mean software engineers will be out of work any time soon. There most definitely is still more than enough work to be done when it comes to automating process. However, the nature of that work will be very different from what we’ve called “software development” for decades now (i.e. coding).