The Post-Developer Era

Summary

Two years ago, in March 2023, I published a blog post called “The End of Front-End Development”. This was right after OpenAI released its GPT-4 showcase, and the general reaction was that human software developers were about to be made redundant, that software would soon be written exclusively by machines. I was skeptical of these claims, and in that blog post, I made the case for why I thought software development would still require humans for the foreseeable future. My hypothesis was that LLMs would augment human developers, not replace them. At the time, the conventional wisdom on Twitter was that it would only be a few months before AI extinguished all demand for human front-end developers, maybe a year or two at most. Well, it’s been over two years since then! So, were they right? Are we currently living in the “post-developer” era? In this blog post, I want to take a fresh look at the current landscape, to see how things have changed, and to see if we can anticipate how things will continue to evolve. If you’re an aspiring developer who is feeling anxious about your future career, my hope is that this post will give you some clarity. ❤️ Over the past few years, companies have definitely been adopting AI tools more and more. For example, Forbes recently published an article titled “AI Writes Over 25% Of Code At Google”(opens in new tab). The article’s title makes it sound like AI is doing 25% of the work and human developers are doing the other 75%, but that’s not actually what’s going on here. That title is misleading, in my opinion. AI may be generating 25% of the code that gets committed at Google, but it’s not acting independently. A skilled human developer is in the driver’s seat, using their knowledge and experience to guide the AI, editing and shaping its output, and mixing it in with the code they’ve written. As far as I know, 100% of code at Google is still being created by developers. AI is just one of many tools they use to do their job. In other wo...