Software development in the age of AI
Our work as software developers has been changing fast and dramatically since the advent of AI agents like Claude Code. We write less and less code by hand and there have been massive layoffs. I've recently been thinking a lot about these changes and the skills required now in order to adapt to them.
AI agents accelerate research, planning, and decisions, which are a big part of the work of a software developer. This can make it easier to implement new features and enable developers to build more, faster. But AI agents can now also write better code than ever, slowly decreasing the value of hand-typed code. The human value now almost exclusively lies in system design, security, and ownership. Code might have become cheap, but systems thinking, exact specifications, and management skills still matter. These have historically been the area of more senior engineers, but will be important for any software developer in order to work well with AI coding agents. These skills are often summarized under the term "orchestration", so, in a way, we're becoming conductors.
The speed at which our field is currently changing can be scary and the future is difficult to predict, but as long as AI requires human input, this is not the end of the road, yet. There will be new opportunities and new types of jobs. Also, just because something can be done in a modern way, doesn't necessarily mean that other methods will go extinct. Computers have been around for decades, but people still like to write on paper.