>And in a way, as an engineer, that's what I want to be doing anyway…
Yuk. That’s pure project management.
> If, in the future, PMs can launch whole features without engineers writing a line of code, that's awesome.
No it’s not! Because then, there is no incentive to engineer anything anymore. Just let the AI do it, Yey! Need new features? Let the AI do it! Need to fix your infrastructure, AI has your back! Has your product gotten so unwieldy that you have context rot and AI can’t do it anymore? Pivot, throw it away, rebuild with AI, who needs engineers.
That's the thing though. I think we're pretty close to AI being able to add fairly vanilla features that fit into the existing architecture fairly autonomously. But I think we're a long way away from AI being able to do major refactors by itself, or even determine what needs refactoring and when. Maybe someday it will, and it can already be useful in implementing pieces of a refactor, but it's nowhere near close on being able to design a major platform shift at the moment. That's entirely a human domain.
So while we're in the middle of those two pivot points, I think most of our work will be on the architecture side. Continuously clean up the platform so the LLM agents can keep humming along on it.
Eventually we'll perhaps get to the point where AI can automate 100% of this as well, and I have no clue what will become of engineers then. But I don't see that happening in the next ten years, and even when it does happen, I'm sure the changes will create whole new industries, workflows, and sets of problems for human engineers to solve. (SciFi me expects a whole new field of extracting the most value out of AI without letting it run amock. As fast as it goes, and as intelligent as it will be, we won't be able to just let it take over. We'll need to design guardrails for it so that it does the things you want, and doesn't make decisions that you don't want. This, by definition, has to be a human driven process. So I think there'll be work for human engineers to do for a long long time.)
Yuk. That’s pure project management.
> If, in the future, PMs can launch whole features without engineers writing a line of code, that's awesome.
No it’s not! Because then, there is no incentive to engineer anything anymore. Just let the AI do it, Yey! Need new features? Let the AI do it! Need to fix your infrastructure, AI has your back! Has your product gotten so unwieldy that you have context rot and AI can’t do it anymore? Pivot, throw it away, rebuild with AI, who needs engineers.