I’m not even remotely worried about AI eliminating software development jobs. In fact, I’m pretty sure there will soon be a boom in both software development jobs and the amount of software available to everyone.
People have always worried about automation causing massive unemployment. Each time a breakthrough happens, folks are sure that “it will be different this time.” Only it never is different.
But the worriers persist.
It’s paradoxical
You can tell them all about the Jevons paradox — the observation that as something becomes more efficient, demand for that more efficient thing increases rather than decreases. In the mid-19th century, William Jevons noticed that the use of coal became more efficient. Humans figured out how to get more heat and energy out of less and less coal. The common belief was that, because less coal was needed for the same amount of energy or heat, there would be less demand for coal as a result. Everyone was concerned that coal miners would lose their jo
Writing code has always been the most time- and resource-intensive task in software development. AI is changing that, and faster than most engineering organizations are prepared for. Tools like Claude Code and Cursor are already handling significant parts of code construction, freeing developers to spend more time on requirements, architecture, and design.
But that shift creates a new challenge nobody is talking about enough. As AI takes on the heavy lifting, the skills that matter most are moving upstream: how to provide the right context for a prompt, how to evaluate what the model produces, and how to understand a problem deeply enough that you can’t be fooled by a confident but wrong answer.
This piece explores those three skills and why developers who master them will have a significant edge over those who don’t.
Beyond coding: Mastering the art of the prompt
Software translation tools such as compilers and assemblers map a high-level description of code to a lower-level represent
Artificial intelligence has had an immediate and profound impact on software development. Coding practices, coding tools, developer roles, and the software development process itself are all being reimagined as AI agents advance on every stage of the software development life cycle, from planning and design to testing, deployment, and maintenance.
Download the May 2026 issue of the Enterprise Spotlight from the editors of CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World and learn how to harness the power of AI-enabled development.
Artificial intelligence has had an immediate and profound impact on software development. Coding practices, coding tools, developer roles, and the software development process itself are all being reimagined as AI agents advance on every stage of the software development life cycle, from planning and design to testing, deployment, and maintenance.
Download the May 2026 issue of the Enterprise Spotlight from the editors of CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World and learn how to harness the power of AI-enabled development.
Infosys said the integration will be used to help its clients modernize software development, automate workflows and deploy AI systems, initially focusing software engineering, legacy modernization, and DevOps.
It’s quite clear that agentic coding has completely taken over the software development world. Writing code will never be the same. Shoot, it won’t be long before we aren’t writing any code at all because agents can write it better and faster than we humans can. That may already be true today.
But there is more to software development than merely writing code, and those areas—source control, documentation, CI/CD, project management—are ripe for some serious disruption from AI as well. Those areas may well be hit harder than coding itself.
I would imagine that if you were in the business of analyzing data and providing dashboard-level insights into that data, then you would be very worried indeed about what AI is going to do to your value proposition. Much of the SaaS industry is in the business of analyzing existing data, and that is exactly what AI agents can do well. When a simple question can get straight to the heart of what a pricey dashboard provides, then companies have to que
It’s quite clear that agentic coding has completely taken over the software development world. Writing code will never be the same. Shoot, it won’t be long before we aren’t writing any code at all because agents can write it better and faster than we humans can. That may already be true today.
But there is more to software development than merely writing code, and those areas—source control, documentation, CI/CD, project management—are ripe for some serious disruption from AI as well. Those areas may well be hit harder than coding itself.
I would imagine that if you were in the business of analyzing data and providing dashboard-level insights into that data, then you would be very worried indeed about what AI is going to do to your value proposition. Much of the SaaS industry is in the business of analyzing existing data, and that is exactly what AI agents can do well. When a simple question can get straight to the heart of what a pricey dashboard provides, then companies have to que
Generative AI has revolutionized the space of software development in such a way that developers can now write code at an unprecedented speed. Various tools such as GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer and ChatGPT have become a normal part of how engineers carry out their work nowadays. I have experienced this firsthand, in my roles from leading engineering teams at Amazon to working on large-scale platforms for invoicing and compliance, both the huge boosts in productivity and the equally great risks that come with GenAI-assisted development.
With GenAI, the promise of productivity is very compelling. Developers who use AI coding assistants talk about their productivity going up by 15% to 55%. But most of the time, this speed comes with hidden dangers. To name a few, AI-generated software without good guardrails could open up security issues, lead to technical debt and introduce bugs that are difficult to detect through traditional code reviews. According to McKinsey research, while G
The current conversation about AI in software development is still happening at the wrong layer. Most of the attention goes to code generation. Can the model write a method, scaffold an API, refactor a service, or generate tests? Those things matter, and they are often useful. But they are not the hard part of enterprise […]
