Thoughts on future of Software development

Working for yourself has advantages and disadvantages. I always wanted to build a business from scratch. It’s not because of the independence one gets from their 9-5 day job - it’s about the freedom and the challenging problems. My expertise lies in web application development and some mobile application work. Every technology advancement has a hype cycle. I agree with Gartner’s hype cycle, which can be used as a framework for analyzing technology. We are currently in the peak of the AI cycle, I believe, and this change will mark a new era.

Impact on jobs especially in Software Development.

I work for a small business company, mostly in a one-person team in software development. We were planning to hire a junior developer for the trivial tasks a year back to speed up the development process. After using AI systems for quite some time now, I can quite confidently say we are not proceeding any further with the hiring process. Claude and ChatGPT systems are making my work a breeze.

It doesn’t matter which technology I work with - the right prompt to these AI models can make you an expert within minutes. This really has a lot of potential, and I have tried it firsthand with my projects Hellokea and Quillcaster. Fixing bugs, designing systems, tweaking CSS, and deploying on servers is so much easier and more enjoyable when using these models as assistance.

If I could feel the difference in my day-to-day workflow, think of large corporations. The adoption of this technology could revolutionize how people work. There could be numerous changes at various levels of organizational structure, which could potentially lead to a more competitive environment resulting in job losses.

The future: Software development

It has become a norm for more than a decade, at least in the field of Information Technology, that the more experience you have, the higher your pay grade. This trend might not last for a long time. Software developers with experience in building applications have already seen the rise and use of AI models, specifically for coding tasks. Recently, Google has reported that new code in the organization was written by AI. This is the beginning of an era where the IT industry is going through a normalization phase. The age of making decent money writing software is settling down.

There used to be a time when a person needed to be skillful in more than one domain. Even now, people in the countryside do more than one job for survival. Similarly, IT professionals need to spread their wings in different fields to survive in the future. If you have high ambitions in life, being good at more than one field is crucial. This is going to be the norm in the future. Soon we could see the rise of startups with very fine-grade products with minimal resources, with AI being their assistance.