Stakeholders are worried. The future of software engineering And everyone is busy making predictions. While some claim that most coding jobs will disappear, others say that there will be an abundance of software engineers in the future. What is reality?

Remember Devin? An AI software engineer created by Cognition Labs got people talking about job displacement. Now, Russell Kaplan, who has joined Cognition Labs as president, is making several predictions about the future of software engineering.

“Models will be extraordinarily good at coding very quickly,” he said, emphasizing that research labs are making coding and reasoning improvements a top priority, such as OpenAI, Meta, and Google. It was clear from the release of models for mathematics.

This investment will soon pay off by changing the software development landscape. Kaplan highlights a unique advantage in coding: the ability to supernormal data scaling through “self-play”.

A team of AI agents

If models can write code, test it, and check for self-consistency, a form of automated monitoring is not possible in most domains due to human skill limitations. Through AI agents.

As a result, software engineering will see a fundamental change. “True coding agents, doing end-to-end tasks, will complement today’s AI copilots,” Kaplan explained.

This would make every engineer akin to an engineering manager, delegating the basic tasks to coding agents for higher-level aspects such as understanding requirements, architecting systems, and deciding what to build.

“Any value that humans can bring here is either in deciding what to work on (e.g. a product), or in something that AI can’t yet do (researching new models )”. agreed Jeremy Bernier, founding engineer of Canvas.

This is similar to what Keras creator Francois Cholet said a few months ago. He prophesied there. There will be about 10 million more coding jobs in the next five years.but these will be for people who are proficient in writing code in Python, but most of the coding will be done by AI.

Chollet previously said, “If you can fully automate software engineering (my job), I think that would be great, because I can then move on to higher-leverage stuff. Soft Creating ware is a means to an end, not an end, he added, adding that software engineering is not just about copying and pasting code, but about mental models of problems and their solutions.

Age of abundance

What is certain is that the role of software engineers will evolve significantly. Kaplan notes that “there will be many more software engineers in the future than there are today.” But “the job will be completely different: more English, less boilerplate coding”.

According to this prediction, engineers will adapt, as they did when transitioning from assembly language to Python. Ironically, English teachers will make excellent engineers.

Interestingly, it could also usher in an era where advertising will focus on AI agents, not developers. Companies that market to developers will start targeting coding agents as well. “Your agent can decide which cloud you use and which database you choose,” Kaplan said. And there will be an army of these agents.

Just as Reid Hoffman predicted the decline of the traditional. 9 to 5 Due to the rise of the gig economy and the focus on results, jobs, product quality standards will increase as developers will be able to ship products faster. This will call for better testing infrastructure, where agents can automatically train, test and verify models and software.

“There’s never been a better or more productive time to be a builder,” he concluded, adding that software like Devin would usher in an era of software abundance.

“Code is largely useless, more of a liability than an asset. Problem solving is where the value is,” Cholett added in his thread. Because software engineering isn’t just about writing or copying code or building AI models. isn’t about tipping, it’s much more than that.

In the future offices will probably have ‘human software engineers’ managing a team of AI engineers, as we predicted.