By Rodney Repullo (*)
The title of this article is provocative to encourage us to better reflect on the projections made by the use of AI in some areas.
The statement made by AWS CEO Matt Garman, that the use of Artificial Intelligence in software development could lead to the extinction of developers in 2 years, is pure hallucination and we need to be sober when reflecting on such a sensitive topic that affects the future of thousands of professionals.
At an event for his staff, the CEO of AWS said that the The end of developers is very near and advised his software engineers to upskill and learn new technologies, warning that AI could replace their work with programming languages within just 2 years. That is, the day after tomorrow.
Matt Garman is right about one thing: software engineers need to qualify and learn new technologies. Otherwise, it's just hallucinations. Artificial Intelligence is and will continue to be a great ally in the work of developers. And it's important to be clear that AI is the legitimate child of these developers and it needs prompt actions to operate.
AI will increasingly advance in supporting the coding performed by developers, but the increased demand for business digitalization, the shortage of developers and the complexity of the entire development cycle, which goes from system design to final testing, gives us full assurance that we are very, very far from seeing the extinction of developers in such a short time.
The high demand for business digitalization has increasingly opened up the market for low-code tools that facilitate the work of creating software solutions and that have increasingly brought end users closer to the creation of solutions, but even so, it requires a development profile both in the creation of these solutions and in the creation of the low-code tool itself.
In other words, there is still a lot of market and a lot of demand for real developers.
AI has helped in this and other work, but it is far from replacing the human brain. It is an excellent option for coding millions of lines of code and typing that really take up the developer's time, who can now think about business and help their organization create more and better software products.
Yet today, only about 51% of software engineers use GenAI tools to help with coding, according to the consultancy. Gartner, which also predicts that by 2027 – 3 years from now, 50% of enterprise software engineers will be using machine learning-based coding tools. In this line, the AWS CEO's 2-year projection is confirmed as pure hallucination.
Eliminating complexities
Anyone who already uses AI to support software development knows that it is useful for reducing the execution time of tasks such as documentation, code generation and refactoring. This topic was addressed in a survey conducted by McKinsey, which found that coding tasks can be up to twice as fast with generative AI, but it still can't handle complex tasks.
Still, it will take more than just tools to unlock the full potential of this disruptive technology, according to McKinsey. The time savings from AI coding can vary significantly based on the complexity of the task and the experience of the developer.
Paradigm shifts?
We agree with the AWS CEO that the change does not mean that developers will lose their jobs, but there would be a shift in the skillset towards work that is more valuable to the business. This is what developers should invest in with the support of AI: thinking more and coding less. Leaving the manual work to AI and focusing on what matters: designing good software products aligned with the business and interests of users.
In fact, this change has been happening for decades with developers using low-code platforms that, to a certain extent, make coding work much easier and bring them closer to the business than to technology.
Returning to the provocation of the title, it is estimated that the Sun will go out in 5 billion years. Certainly, the Earth will die before that, about a few billion years before. It is difficult to predict, but there will still be enough time for software developers to deliver good solutions.
(*) Bachelor of Physics from USP, Rodney Repullo is CEO of Magic Software Brasil.
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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