Opinion: AI and Software Development Careers - Part 1

I recently was panelist in a session on how AI is affecting software development as a career. I decided that my notes from that session should be written up as a series of blog posts.

Part 1: The developer role certainly is changing

We’re fast moving from developers primarily writing code to developers increasingly directing, evaluating, and integrating code. But writing code isn’t going away. The value of producing code is declining relative to the value of knowing what code should do.

Instead of spending an afternoon implementing something, a developer might spend 15 minutes describing it and significantly longer validating, integrating, and refining the result. The balance of the work changes.

Important skills:

There is a set of skills that I think are now the most important:

Requirements engineering / Specification. This is the ability to describe precisely what you want. Vague thinking now produces confident-looking wrong code at scale. That doesn’t help anyone.

Code Review, Debugging and investigation have become more important. Reading code critically is now a daily skill, not something you only occasionally do. This involves reading diffs and spotting subtle logic bugs, security vulnerabilities, or anti-patterns in AI-generated code.

Systems thinking. You need to understand how components fit together, how they fail, and how to scale them.

Orchestrating Tools. Developers are moving from being authors to roles that are more like editors and system conductors.

Domain expertise becomes a real differentiator. This has always been the case, but a developer who deeply understands healthcare, finance, manufacturing, databases, or logistics has a huge advantage over someone who simply knows a programming language.

Communication is a critical skill. You need to be good at translating between people, requirements, and machines.

We’ve spent decades teaching developers how to tell computers what to do. Now we need to become much better at deciding what computers should do. The bottleneck is moving from can you write it to can you judge if it’s right.

(And thanks to Imkara Visual for the awesome Unsplash image).

2026-11-07