RIP Software Devs, Long Live Software Devs

You’ve seen the headlines — the entry-level software developer position is dead. As much as some are willing to bet on that future reality, I will argue we are further away from that reality than most of us think. 

But perhaps the future will resemble an Ironman-style software developer – part human and part machine. A Jarvis for every company, rather than a Devin. And if this is the case, what form factor will this future software developer take? 

Will it be one agent to rule them all — an agentic software developer capable of autonomously doing low-level software development work? Is it an agent for each function – requirements gathering, system design, coding, review, testing/Q+A, deployment, monitoring, and documentation — stitched together in an agentic system? Opinions may differ on how close to either future state we are, but what is clear is that we are in the age of AI-enhanced copilots. 

GitHub Copilot was the first to usher in the generative pair programmer, and the market has quickly evolved. Cognition.ai’s Devin took social media by storm with a demo of a semi-autonomous coding agent, and then the hype deflated a little more recently. There are also companies like Nustrom, whose agents are building side hustles, and Felicis investment poolside, which is putting together an incredible team of deep learning experts to build highly capable ML coding assistants. 

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