Am I the only one that has noticed the massive increase in buggy software across almost every domain? Like, EVERYTHING has so many more bugs now. Things just break constantly. AI isn’t one shotting fixing bugs, it’s one shotting making hundreds of new ones.

What he describes is exactly what I’m seeing as well. But I also think his last section emphasizes the importance of having a human steer the ship. If you think LLMs are sycophantic when they talk to you, the Code Review Agents / LLMs are doubly so for their own work “dev bot: you asked me to do x so that’s what I did.” QA bot “I can verify that you asked dev bot to do x and that’s exactly what it did” - Humans have to be in the mix to ensure that a) the code is organized and not recursive spaghetti and b) that the software actually does what you wanted it to do both from the front and backend.

The AI does homogenize some of the playing field, but experts are still needed who understand the intent of the software. I wouldn’t trust an AI dev to conform to all GAAP standards. They can help inform code and even provide the documentation, but ultimately a human needs to validate the deliverables.

And if you thought agents were bad at updating legacy code, just see what they can do with their own code when you ask it to add 50 + features that weren’t in the original request. 🤯

So, let me give some advice to others entering into this industry. The way I see it, there are going to be 2 distinct paths in software moving forward.

1. be customer facing - product management is going to be merged with implementation consulting. These will be the “private eyes” who understand how a customer is using the software, understands the enhancements, the bugs, etc and also trains the customer how to use the software. With how fast AI can now code, it will be interesting to see if we go back to a world where everything is bespoke and disparate (like those homegrown access dnd back in the day) - I certainly hope not or if we’ll stick with platform “COTS” software (think SAS, Intuit, workday, Kronos, Maximo, etc). I’m any case, customers will request more customization because they’ll start to realize it’s now much easier to customize. These “private eyes” will be who informs the developers and helps structure how the updates can work within the platform framework. I think the era of product management and implementation being separate careers is dead.

2. The development architects. These will be the folks who take in the inputs from the customer facing team and determine the best way to build it into the architecture. They’ll have a legion of agents that they control: research, development, QA, technical documentation. Each architect will be in charge of a district product line. You need people who are experts in their domain to do this work. And these people once again become those developer unicorns that were once (and in some cases still are) the backbone of software companies. Your developer will now be doing the work that a team of 5-10 people would have done in the past. But that should also mean that we should be able to employ more of these brilliant architect types.

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What I struggle with long term, however, is why do we need system software at all? People notoriously hate entering info into systems. They may want to see the data in fancy graphics and infographics, but no one wakes up in the morning and goes “I’m really looking forward to doing all that data entry today.” Humans are also notoriously bad at updating where they are within workflows - we tend to work in the physical realm and update the software as time allows. Agents can and will do a lot of this work moving forward. And they’ll do it (if the systems are built with standards in mind) more consistently than any human would have - a person will just need to validate the data governance. This is how we get to the world of Star Trek, where the computer does the technological lifting and humans do the the human interaction bits. I think (but not sure - do we go back to mainframes???) that databases will still be needed. But software workflows can all be dialed in through training the LLMs. I’m already starting to see it with some of the tools available, but right now it’s very Wild West - at some point once we get the horse back under us, there will need to be standards built in, rather than each person doing it just a little bit differently and therefore getting slightly different results.

My man… Your saying that the software you specialize in is full of bugs. Take advantage of those bugs to make money, wreak havoc, destroy companies, ceo’s, whatever you want to do. You owe them nothing. If they insisted on having AI make them a shittier product, give them their just rewards.