You know, about one and a half years ago, I said to my friends, that my job (meaning manually implementing software) will be dead in two years and that generally speaking big organizations (and parts of the government), especially in Germany will probably need around 5 years to get fully on board, because their processes are slow and change is their Kryptonite.
After one and a half years in, I think we are right on track with that prediction (of course, I am blinded by confirmation bias). Most people still writing code by hand are the ones who can’t use coding agents for legal reasons or who put secret keys into self-hosted version control and now have a hard time pruning them from history.
The rest are building feedback and verification loops that slowly include ever more parts of the software development cycle. At first it was about getting code changes through the compiler, then it was about getting tests right, then people were doing automatic videos of features and now we are at the point where somebody might report a bug (or a small feature) through some channel, the agent picks it up, fixes it, deploys behind a feature flag, watches the logs to see if the bug is fixed (or the feature implemented), deploys for all, declares victory and makes a suggestion for an individual message to the bug/feature reporter.
Small models are not capable of that loop yet, but given the trajectory of the past year, I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a 17GB file (referring to qwen3.8:27b) in about half a year, that actually was capable enough of doing that. Make it 32GB for all I care - it’s nothing.
At that point, I think the “craft” and “art” of software development will be needed even less. Where privacy and data protection concerns might have stopped people from letting an agent fumble around with server administration, database management, or performance optimisation (especially in the EU), they can then do it with virtually unlimited token budgets 24/7.
In that case, why wouldn’t you shift your whole dev environment onto some servers idling around, letting agents handle installing the right dependencies and having them ping you in Slack, Mattermost, Teams, what-have-you when the next feature is done? Why do you need local dev? Do you still need tests in CI? Have you tried letting a SOTA agent set up a server and giving you a script to change the passwords afterwards? Optimize database performance? It’s insane what they are capable of.
For now, the taste and knowledge for composable foundations is still needed. But almost every piece of tacit knowledge can be automated away, with enough self-reflection, data and another markdown file. That, however, might be a topic for another post.