My prediction: someone still has to maintain it

LinkedIn lately seems to be all about making predictions and sharing them, so I'll add mine in the same spirit.

What the industry actually does

What do people do as engineers, managers and every other role in software? Almost 90% of the industry supports projects, applications and platforms that are effectively in maintenance mode. These products have poor documentation (agile), tribal knowledge, bugs hidden long enough to be used as features, and undocumented product decisions, but they also have real revenue and real customers that pay for the maintenance.

Oh, I forgot to add: on most of these products you barely make one line of change a week, so development speed isn't the bottleneck. Aligning with the business, understanding the implications, preparing, and rolling out gradually take most of the time. More often than not, the impact of a one-line change takes a while to surface. In most cases, skeleton crews manage all of this.

What changes with AI

With AI, you can write more code and build more products faster. What next? Those products will eventually need maintaining if they get real customers and sustainable revenue.

AI can of course help maintain them, up to a certain degree of complexity, but it needs a handler with business understanding and domain expertise. And humans have their own limits on how much domain knowledge and context they can manage.

Better yet, if these products gain enough momentum, they start showing cracks under load, also known as growing pains. No one builds a startup with architecture in mind from day one. It's a business trade-off, for good enough reasons.

So, jobs?

Tooling always makes a difference, and it's always good to stay on top of it when you can. But will AI lead to the loss of software jobs? That's not really practical at this time.

Construction and automated driving have far fewer variables. Watch them as the maturity indicator for AI and automation. Everything else is marketing (and hype), because people have to sell their stuff 😀