The Future of Software Engineering with AI

What does the future of software engineering look like when an AI agent is accessible to anyone?

The important distinction to make is that code itself is a tool to solve a problem. AI agents are really good at writing code. This is because a huge part of their training data comes from code repositories with decades of coding history where many common problems have already been solved a thousand times.

Anyone can ask AI to piece together something personally for them, and it will probably work. However, maintaining that same personal project gets tricky as soon as the same person wants to add a new feature. This new feature could be completely incompatible with what was already written. This means that the AI will now need to completely rewrite parts of the program to try to reconcile the established features with the new.

Now what if someone asks AI to make a program for their own business? It's not just going to be one user; there now needs to be usernames and passwords. That adds new dimensions, both on security and availability. Will the non-technical user know how to keep it running? Can AI effectively guide someone through cloud architecture, or provide steps to add a reverse proxy on the office computer so it can be accessed from home (and hopefully not for just anyone)?

This is where the software engineer will exist. It's going to be the years of experience in design and architecting systems where the main goal is to be maintainable, sustainable, and secure. Writing code is now the cheapest part of software engineering. Judgement and decision making are now even more valuable, and this means having experience in different domains with different requirements will make the difference between a cool little tool that turns out to be a security liability, and the tool that speeds up production while not becoming the next hacking target.

If you've built something with AI and it's working, good. That's exactly what it's for. The question to ask now is who's responsible for it when it stops working, when a second person needs access, or when a customer asks how their data is protected. That's not a coding question. It's an engineering one, and it's the part that didn't get cheaper.