With the advent of coding agents and their improvement, developing software as we have been doing it is, at least in many fields, already going the way of the Dodo. But bear with me for a second while I try to explain why I think this is great for developers and I am not actually trying to doom-bait.
It was never about just typing the code
This is now cliché, but also the crux of the matter. A year into working on a side project like it’s my job, and having made wide use of AI coding agents, I can say I was surprised by the perspective shift this allowed for me.
AI is great at anything mundane
Once one accepts that, and after developing a sense of how to constrain and harness the randomness and chaos an LLM is able to produce in seconds, this frees energy attention that can be dedicated to what really matters.
The interface is the thing
And I mean interface in a ‘fractal’ way. A UI is an interface, but so is a JSON API, and so is a function signature.
I see now that I can dedicate much more time thinking through how I envision the app to work, how I expect the user to interact with it, how I expect the internal components to talk to each other to allow the user interaction I want to create.
If I let go of some of the implementation to an agent, it is much easier to dedicate myself to design and architecture, which is what agents seem to be terrible at, at least for now.
The Developer is Dead, long live the Designer
I have always felt that the most enjoyable part of the job was designing the application much more than implementing it. I love coding too, and I still manually intervene, nudging the agent as if I were backseat coding in a pairing session, and often I will stop the machines and implement a critical component exclusively by hand, because I need to know the ins and outs of it. But mostly I have a relationship with coding which reminds me of a woodworker with power tools and a chisel. Do most of the job rapidly with an agent, then take your chisel and refine those cuts for the perfect fit.
LLM are great at reproducing what has been done over and over, and a lot of us have made a living until now by cranking out CRUD apps. The change can be daunting, but was this ever fun? I move that no, it wasn’t, and that’s why we cram so much complexity in these things. Give ourselves a challenge.
I think the change AI is making in the industry can be a positive one, even for the worker (assuming the bubble does not burst, that is). Make your own project, dedicate yourself to perfecting user interactions, architecture, design.