If it gets to the point that developers no longer need to write or read code, just manage agentic swarms, then what is the reason for developers?
As far as I can tell, agentic software development (aka vibe coding) simply doesn't scale for lay people. At $WORK, I'm seeing the 5th version of the same small project being rewritten by execs. The 5th version is marginally better than the previous 4, but it still has major problems. 5th version has no CI and accesses 6 databases directly. These VPs are slowly becoming software engineers. It's hilarious to watch, but seems rather inefficient.
I've been asked this question by non-software people and the best answer I've come up so far is this. You can go to the hardware store and purchase a chainsaw. You can now prune small trees. This does not make you an arborist though. For reference check out YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=arborist+fails+...
Thoughts?
Tell me you weren't around for the dot com bubble without telling me.
At that point in time if you told any one you could build on the web they spent an hour pitching you their bad idea and then wanted you to build it for nothing. They thought the value was in the idea, not the implementation.
Now, if you have an idea, then go use AI to prototype, to validate, to iterate.
IF that results in a viable product then you need an engineer to go in and do the needed work to operationalize it. To attach testing, monitoring, deployment and more over cost metrics (something we have not really done in the last 30 years) - because a good idea that costs more to run than it makes is not a good idea.
The nuance is here - the "tweak this and we can save $0.50 a user a month" is how you move the needle at scale.
Programing is dead, Software development has a narrow place - engineering for sustainability, reliability and cost are what the field is going to become. Someone has to be responsible, or be on the hook for the 3am on a holiday weekend phone call.
Cost, latency, security, auditing, monitoring, operating.
LLMs can handle the functional requirements of “give me this output for these inputs” very well.
That's another huge gap. Folks without software background cannot seem to grasp incremental improvement. This is why we're on v5. The solution to product's shortcomings is to start a brand new project.
I'm waiting to see if people start dropping massive trees on their houses, or if we're all arborists now.
So, if anything, if the intent is "I can do it all myself and I will fire you now" - I love to see them stumble, if the intent is "I want to get my hands dirty and let's work together" - I will be happy to assist. It's not a pipe dream: it does happen.
If you are an exec building an app then the journey is likely to be uninteresting and an impediment to getting to a product. I don't think we'll uncover anything new here that we couldn't reason about before. When execs, or other non-programmers, do get decide to get involved, there is a probability that they will learn something more about software engineering inside their organization. That is the thing that software engineers need to be concerned about because depending on the circumstances, the execs will uncover things which shorten the tenure of SWEs or their management.
I can appreciate the internal beauty but getting "a thing that does thing and does it well", and seeing others enjoy using it has way more value for me than "what type system could work more elegantly here".