“Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.” — Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA (2017/2024)
“In 5 years, traditional software engineering won’t exist.” — Anonymous, Reddit/Programming
“AI is going to kill open source.” — Travis Reeder, Developer
“AI-driven automation will continue to eliminate traditional jobs but also create new opportunities…” — Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA
“The entry-level software job? Gone. The mid-level dev? Almost useless.” — Reddit/Programming
This is just some of the quotes and vibes surrounding the current AI revolution and it is the last one “entry-level software will be gone” that triggered one of my junior developers to raise a consern at the coffee machine yesterday. “I only have 3 years in the bussiness, how can I be relevant. What will happen to my friend who is getting his degree this spring?”
To all of you new and junior developers out there I just want to say congratulations. You have been lucky to start your journey at the most exiting era of software engineering so far. And the previous eras was to be honest quite awesome and cool.
Lets start with a little history lesson. There are many definitions of the different eras in computer science. I am a “follower” of Grady Booch, the Bill Baily of Software Engineering, and his way of describing it.
The first golden era
During the years 1956-1974, there was a lot of things happening in the bigger computer science area. Much of it happened in the academic and research but defence and the cold war was also a big contributer to this. During this, the era or computer science, we find the birth of many of our programming language and paradigms. Grady states that at some points, there was over 14.000 programming languages and that at a time when there was maybe 20-30.000 programmers. Many systems had their own programming language and most of the programmers was female.
In 1970s, we had the rise of the micro computer with cool things like Altair 8800 and the famous Apple II. My first one in the early 80’s was an Sony MSX HitBit 75P
Existensial crisis
Fundamentials is never going to go away
Grace Hopper - David Letterman
more software written by people that are not developers
dario - antrophic quote of “12 months” - Bullshit. He does not understand Software Engineering.
Software Engineering - Software Development - Programming
Accellerated understanding, accellerated automation.
So the AI writing code is to SE as the high level languages and compilers was to assembler and targeted languages in the 70’s
