From Hammers to Blueprints

I am working on adding job search capabilities to the Adrift project. As an experiment, I decided to rewrite the SaaS as a standalone application in Rust. I don't know Rust beyond 'Hello world!'. AI had a fully functioning Rust app within two hours. If creating code becomes essentially free, What Comes Next ™?. We, the wizards who studied and implemented and spoke strange words around making computers do our bidding, are quickly moving toward a time when code creation will not require our direct involvement at all.

Your skill with a slide rule is quickly becoming irrelevant.

The myriad frameworks and language abstractions that we have built over the last thirty years will become less useful, abstraction and simplification were designed to make code easier for humans to understand and create. What place does that abstraction have if we can ask an AI to write a tool or program using a solid but difficult to learn fundamental like Rust or ECMAScript 6? How are tools going to advance when you can just skip to the answer? Coding, the ability to sit at a terminal and turn ideas into functioning software, is going away.

But changing the nature of our work will not remove the need for the role we play. Our part of this future is in articulating what we want and being able to smell bad code or bad design. Any programmer with a few years of experience has developed a sense of when the code tastes right, when the network architecture is clean, when the parts are working together in harmony. That sense, the ability to detect right code from merely working code, is what will determine future career success in this field. We must develop the skill of making decisions and guiding tools toward the right outcome. Our success will come by keeping Bob from accounting from inserting functionality into the codebase that exposes passwords or crashes the database every 3 hours. When failures occur, Bob isn't going to take the fall, the person who allowed that code into production will.

I think the role we are moving from is the guys with the hammers to the guys drawing up the blueprints. We will still need to know what everything does and work with customers to understand their needs. We will still need to have a good working knowledge of materials and the landscape. We will all be software architects.