Here’s a radical thought: software engineering will for the most part cease to exist in 20 years.

Why? How? Let’s think about this like a Sci-Fi story…

To begin, it is not difficult to imagine that AI systems will trained on prior art in the same way they are trained on images, essays, etc. If you saw this in a movie, it would be totally believable.

So in this way, simple text prompts will produce entire, tested software programs.

This is just like asking DALL-e to show a “picture of a goat standing on top of a cow in a field of sunflowers on a sunny day.”

Furthermore, it is quite possible that this will be done as part of the AI “operating system” of the computer.

In other words, the computer system will naturally request or seek specific training sets to “learn” how to solve a specific problem as part of its natural functionality in meeting the request of the user.

For example, let’s say we are on a secret mission and we need a totally new way of communicating with headquarters that can’t be easily broken in 24 hours.

Once upon a time…

We ask our computer system to solve an important problem. We need a new, secure communications capability.

Prompt: “Build a novel secure communications capability”

The computer responds ”ok,” then requests specific parameters, or the specifications for the system:

“Are you able to answer these questions,” it says.

“Frequency range, modulation preference, error coding, permissible bandwidth, frame size, handshake, probability of intercept, message length, etc.”

You aren’t a comms engineer, so you say “no” and then ask for the computer system to ask for higher level requirements.

The computer says “ok,” and then asks “how secure do you need your comms system to be, how long is the message you want to send, how many times do you need to use this, can it be seen or must it be hidden and how much time do I have to send a message?”

…or something like that.

The computer may also request the necessary quality and documentation required. In other words, it asks “does this software need to be readable by a human?”

With these answers that you provide, then the system requests access to prior art from open source secure communications systems that already exist.

You are prepared for this part, so you provide the necessary details.

From these data, the AI computer system takes over and produces several potential solutions, tests these against the specs, and then iterates to produce a final set of solutions.

In the end, with a little bit of human input, the system produces an optimal solution to the secure communications problem.

And it only takes ten minutes to do all of this.

The end.

It’s just a story, but given the state of AI, I would predict that we will be seeing the first of these systems in commercial use in the near future-certainly before the end of the decade.

And I would not be shocked if these already exist behind closed doors.

It is difficult to imagine how this will affect the economy. It may not be pretty.

But disruptions happen dramatically. In other words, relatively quickly with mass adoption.

There were horses for transportation, and then there weren’t.

There were factories and factory jobs, and then there weren’t.

It took weeks of research at a library to find information, and then it took ten minutes.

I believe that change will happen dramatically in software sometime soon. If you use your imagination, you might see that change has to happen because of economic pressure. There aren’t enough programmers, the salaries are getting very high, and technology demands are growing exponentially.