Matteo has some good points about The Future of the Software Engineering Career. For one, valuable engineers will have to rely on fundamentals to work with generated code:
Algorithms. Distributed systems. Hardware architectures. Cache management techniques. Networking fundamentals. Database internals. These aren’t academic exercises anymore. They’re the foundation for evaluating AI-generated code.
When an AI produces a sorting algorithm, can you tell if it’s appropriate for your data properties? When it suggests a caching layer, do you understand the trade-offs in consistency? When it generates a distributed system design, can you spot the failure modes?
There are endless layers to study here. Computer science fundamentals that seemed theoretical suddenly matter for practical work. The student who deeply understands how things work will outperform the one who only knows how to use them.
You know, the hard parts of software development.
I completely agree with his prediction that there will be a boom in small business applications that can be built using AI:
Remember when every business needed a website, and local web developers built them? We’re about to see the same thing, but for custom software applications…
This is going to be a booming industry. And it favors people who can talk to clients, understand their real problems, and deliver working solutions. It favors generalists who can move quickly over specialists in narrow technologies. It favors judgment over raw coding speed
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