we’re about to find out what taste looks like when nobody grew up doing the thing.
…
Developers write software the way singers sing. That was true when it was free and it’ll be true when it’s automated, and the people who love it will keep doing it, and some of the best software will keep coming from them. It just won’t be the job.
…
What’s left of making software is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use. That cost is per piece of software and doesn’t transfer, so as the amount of software goes to infinity, which it will because there’s no ceiling on demand, that cost becomes the whole job.
-- Laurie Voss
I wonder if we as a profession, will operate in 10 years similarly to how doctors consult nowadays. Someone’ll book a 20-minute slot to talk to me about a new product or a change to one of their existing products, I’ll carefully extract and jot down as much info as I can about their problem, along with my suggestions. At the end, they’ll leave my office with a SPEC.md of sorts signed with my private key, to hand over to their personal agent to implement.
For more complex, or multiple changes they would book another meeting. Or they might book a checkup of the changes in two weeks’ time. But in essence, both our interactions and my input would me significantly more limited than it is now.
The more I think about this the less crazy it sounds. Let’s see what happens.