I read an article named The Future of Software Development by Alex Iskold. He predicts a future where only a few high quality software engineers will be able to serve the world’s need of computer systems.

With a bit of discipline and a ton of passion, high quality engineers are able to put together systems of great complexity on their own.

The idea is that fewer but more specialized people will be able to do more in less time.

Equipped with a modern programming language, great libraries, and agile methods, a couple of smart guys in the garage can get things done much better and faster than an army of mediocre developers.

I’d like to take this prediction a bit further. Well, quite a bit further actually. I see the extinction of software engineers altogether.

Programming as we know it, is a tedious, highly repetitive and error-prone business. It’s the task of telling the computer how to do things, rather than what to do. In other words: we are still dealing with computers at a very low level.

I see a future where we tell the computer, a kind of super-compiler, what we want to achieve. The input is our specification, and the output is a complete and tested system. All we have to do is specify, verify and then push the deploy button.

There’ll be, as Alex pointed out, room for less and less programmers until they finally face extinction. The last programmer will probably live to see the super-compiler’s AI get clever enough to perform self-debugging and self-improvement.

That’s All Folks!