Ask HN: What will software engineering look like 100 years from now?

100 years is enough time for all sorts of regulatory capture and other tricks to try and create barriers to entry and monopoly

I can picture way more bureaucracy about both the legal practice of software development as well as registering the software, having it audited for "harm" (look at all the movements within ML to try and leech off of this).

Additionally, I expect efforts to destroy open source or pervert it towards pet corporate or political causes will cause at minimum an extremely fractured environment, it not a set of walled gardens where you're stuck paying for MS Linux and only writing for the MS store or whatever.

Add to that some bloated "low-code" thing optimized to remove agency from developers so the lowest skill commodity workers can do whatever minimal human task is still required, so that even a quantum computer will buckle under the weight of whatever 30x incepted framework the web-app you use is running in.

Of course I'm a pessimist.

I prefer a more utopian view. Software engineers will live in a world where cheap and efficient power will be available to all thanks to big advances in solar/wind/tidal/etc energy generation, and similar advances in battery/capacitor tech. Drinking water will also be widely available thanks to better desalination and water reclamation. Food tech will also advance, but access to food will be a limiting factor.

Moore's Law and similar exponential trends will be dead - computing hardware will be a largely solved problem, with improvements made only at the edges. User interfaces, however, will still be an ever-evolving free-for-all (way beyond desktop/mobile/watch) which will supply much work for both frontend engineers - always looking for the edge to keep people engaged and on-site - and backend engineers still seeking for the best solution to manage the vast quantities of data generated while at the same time keeping users synched across a diverse range of input devices from muscle spasms to decorative brooches (not forgetting the bathroom mirror).

Beyond that, I expect working practices to be largely unchanged. Possibly a lot more hybrid working (mostly remote, but with regular physical in-office - or in-venue - days). Initial code will probably be AI generated so the work will tend to skew more to edge-case testing and code-adaption to specified requirements. Spreadsheets will still exist though - hopefully - slide presentations will be ancient history. AI-excluded coding will be viewed as an enjoyable hobby, possibly even an art form.

... And I will still be alive, probably riding through the corridors of my retirement home on a rainbow-coloured unicorn!

Millions of programmers will collaborate on projects so vast as to be beyond human comprehension. Our AI managers will force us to work for food, water, and air from bunkers along the Sierra coastline. The civilian reservations around the Once Great Lakes will get continuous feeds of psychedelic stimulation by cranial fiber optic cable. All hail President Hypno Toad.

There will be a lot of strange old but new words, like you'll have to wait for the nuptials to subside before you can see where the latest trammel is coming from. Then you'll see Endorsement again and you'll have to decide whether to pay for a couple breakpoints (the old way) or hire an intoxicant to inspect your girders.

We will still be maintaining massive codebases of COBOL and Java and Python that we have lost the ability to re-write.