Engineering software today becomes a profession where AI can make the most difference. GitHub and the availability of open source code, as well as natural language texts, provided the best possible fuel for creating large and great models. Some predict that we will not need programmers any more, but I predict that we will need them. I also think that these programmers will be much better than they are today. I view the future as quite optimistic and bright for our profession.
To begin with, I see the profession to change in a way that one single programmer will be more like a team leader for a number of LLMs or bots – hence the title. The programmer will use one model/bot for extracting requirements from standards, documents, twitters or other text sources. The requirement bot will help the programmer to find the user stories/requirements, to prioritize them and to set up a backlog.
Then, the programmer will use another bot to create high-level design. The bot will provide an initial design and will provide the programmer with some sort of conversational interface to reason about the design – the patterns, the architectural styles and the typical non-functional characteristics to maintain for the software.
At the same time, the programmer will use either the same bot or another one to write the source code of the software. We already use tools like GitHub CoPilot for these tasks and these tools will be even better. When constructing the software, the programmer will also use testing bots to create test cases and to improve the programs. Here, the work on program repair is definitely very interesting as it provides the ability to automatically improve the low-level design of the software.
Finally, when the software is complete, then during the release, the programmer will use bots to monitor the software. Finding defects fast, monitoring the performance, availability and security of software will be delegated to even more bots. They will do the work faster than any programmer anyways.
The job of the programmer will then be to instruct, integrate and monitor these bots. A little bit like a team leader who needs to make sure that all team members agree on certain principles. This means that the programmers will need to know more about the domains where they work as well as they will need access to tooling that supports their workflows.
What will also change is our perception of quality of software. If we can use these bots and make the software construction much faster, then we probably will not need to write super-maintainable code – the bots will be able to decipher even the most obscure code and help us to improve it. Hey, maybe these bots will even write a completely new version of our software once they learn how to optimize their design and when we learn how to link these bots to one another. Regardless, I do not think they will be able to write a Skynet kind of code….
