This is part of a series of blog posts that stemmed from my first experiences with “vibe coding”. For more on what I did and where you can find the rest of the posts, please refer to the first post.
In the last six posts I described both the opportunities presented by AI assisted coding and the current limitations. Over the next four posts I’m going to talk about what it all means, how I think you can use these technologies today, and how they will impact the software development process over the next few years.
The first thing I want to call out is that I think that AI assisted coding will cause a huge shift in the type of developers that provide the most value. Today, the full stack engineer is king. The rise of the full stack engineer was to combat the inefficiency of having specialized teams for development, infrastructure/operations, database, etc… Companies found that by adding unicorns who could work effectively at each layer of the stack, they could greatly increase the efficiency of the team by reducing the number of handoffs between teams.
With AI assisted coding, everyone is a full stack developer. Take me for example. I am well past my coding prime and was never good at user interfaces. AI helped me upgrade my UI, change my algorithm, and clear out some tech debt with my CI/CD deployments. With AI assisted coding, even I’m a full stack developer!
With this change, the biggest inefficiency in the software development process will become the translation between the business’ actual need and the software to be built. I think this will create the rise of the “Full Scope Developer” who will be able to understand and synthesize what the business really wants (be a sort of “product owner”) while also leveraging AI assisted coding to be the developer.
I suspect something similar likely happened in the airline industry with the rise of automatic pilot. Before automatic pilot airlines would have wanted to have pilots that could navigate challenging situations and still give passengers a smooth ride. I imagine that these pilots would not necessarily have needed to be particularly good at managing the crew, being friendly with the passengers, etc… to be prized by the airline. Once it became significantly easier to safely and comfortably steer the plane, I imagine the requirements for pilots shifted away from those who could steer smoothly.
Some of these full scope developers will be architects and senior devs who invest the time to learn about the businesses that they operate in. But I suspect even more will be the product owners and really good business analysts who recognize the barrier to entry in application development is dropping quickly. Perhaps even some folks were developers early in their career, became more analysts/architects, and now will be able to go back to coding since it takes less time. Successful companies will want to invest in this transition now both by looking at their current analysts and by hiring developers with this kind of potential.