Tech leaders have long sought out the elusive 10x software engineer. With the AI and automation tools emerging from the latest in Generative AI and LLMs, we are witnessing a seismic shift in machine capabilities. At Emergent, we have been meeting companies and seeing numerous AI-native products that can help dev teams step up the game manifold across the software development and deployment cycle, including capabilities to:
– Generate increasingly sophisticated code
– Help humans understand complex code and collaborate better
– Document the code
– Seamlessly connect and integrate with data sources and other systems
– Thoroughly test and secure the code
– Effortlessly deploy and monitor the software
– And much more
As these advancements unfold, one can’t help but wonder: what is the future of software?
In the coming time, we believe we will see 100x and 1000x engineers. These will be people who can:
– Track and understand the latest and best dev tools that AI has to offer, and leverage whatever is most relevant to the task at hand
– Pre-empt and/or catch errors that machines make and fill in for their blind spots
– Design, architect and manage the overall system (with machine help of course)
– Move at the speed of machines
The pace of software creation is about to see an incredible inflection, and software engineering will look very different a few years from now. As a hands-on developer and researcher early in my career, some of my biggest frustrations were around repetitively writing similar pieces of code, and spending hours on manual debugging to find small errors I had made. Things have come a long way since, and machines are about to dramatically reduce further the amount of repetitive manual work needed to bring great software products to life.
If you’re building something pathbreaking to empower software engineers to increase their productivity 100x, 1000x, and more, I’m all ears.