Obsoletion by AI

There has been a trend over the last 5-10 years, where more and more money is being thrown at startups who claim (mistakenly) to be making software developers obsolete by use of AI. Of course, as a rule - generalizations are never accurate. However, in this case it’s a bit funny to watch certain valley tech incubators and fund houses keep throwing good money in this area.

IMO software developers being obsolete or sentient AI writing code is just a black hole. Anyone who does software development today, knows that there is no singular right way of doing software development, build, release, deploy - and there never will be.

There is no golden set of software that everyone uses. Heck, there are multiple ways to solve the same problem even if you are dealing with the same cloud provider. There are L programming languages, M stacks, N OS’es, P end-user device types… the list goes on and on.

There are X ways of doing identity, Y ways of doing policy enforcement, Z ways of auditing…* again, the list goes on and on.

No two production environments are the same - even on a single cloud provider. No 2 networks are the same, compute is optimized for specific types of workloads, same holds true for storage and so on.

On one hand, the target itself is such a big mish-mash of things. On the other hand, for any domain slice that is chosen, the domain itself is intricate enough that no one software even today solves all the problems in an optimum manner for all it’s customers.

Coming to the AI bit, given the intricacies of the domain and the wonderland of software - pray, tell me how will the AI learn and who will it learn from? For sure, it will learn from existing body of work out there, and hence it’s bound to be sub-optimal & error-prone.

Suggesting Auto-completions is a easier problem as compared to suggesting the best way to write a piece of code given the context. Yes, the repetitive & mundane parts can be generated, code for known patterns suggested but help me understand, how does an AI define an optimum datastructure or algorithm to evaluate firewall rules on IPv6 sets vs IPv4 sets 😏

Long story short - AI at best, can play a supportive role in software development. Any nirvana claims being peddled around getting rid of software developers are just proclamations by false messiahs - and deserve to be black-holed. VC crowd can keep spreading the FUD to drive the valuations of their investments up - but sorry, it aint leading to any obsoletion of software developers; not by a long shot!