Top industry leaders and entrepreneurs believe that artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and predict that it will significantly reduce manual coding work.
While Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho, believes AI will be able to handle 90 per cent of coding jobs, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman is concerned that this development may lead to fewer jobs for software engineers in the future.
According to Vembu, AI can efficiently handle the repetitive nature of programming work, which is why it could take over most coding jobs.
“When people say ‘AI will write 90% of the code’ I readily agree because 90% of what programmers write is ‘boilerplate’ (.sic),” he wrote on X.
He discussed the distinction between "essential complexity" and "accidental complexity," a concept explored in The Mythical Man-Month, a book on software engineering.
While AI is adept at reducing unintentional complexity, humans are still required to handle essential complex tasks, he said, according to The Economic Times.
According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, artificial intelligence could eventually lessen the demand for software engineers. While the shift is not immediate, it is obvious that the industry is moving towards it.
“Each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while,” he said. “And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers,” he said.
Altman, 39, discussed how artificial intelligence is transforming software development in a conversation with Stratechery's Ben Thompson.
He claimed that learning coding abilities provided a competitive advantage in the past. He contrasted this to the early 2000s when the primary goal was to become a skilled developer. The goal now is to master AI tools.
"The obvious tactical thing is just get really good at using AI tools," Altman said, adding that over 50 per cent of the companies already use AI in their code.
