Comment by thewebguyd
7 days ago
> I think there's a huge huge space of software to build that isn't being touched today because it's not cost-effective to have an engineer build them.
That's definitely an interesting area, but I think we'll actually see (maybe) individual employees solving some of these problems on their own without involving IT/the dev team.
We kind of see it already - a lot of these problem spaces are being solved with complex Excel workflows, crappy Access databases, etc. because the team needed their problem solved now, and resources couldn't be given to them.
Maybe AI is the answer to that so that instead of building a house of cards on Excel, these non-tech teams can have something a little more robust.
It's interesting you mentioned accounting, because that's the one department/area I see taking off and running with it the most. They are already the department that's effectively programming already with Excel workflows & DSLs in whatever ERP du jour.
So it doesn't necessarily open up more dev jobs, but maybe fulfills the old the mantra of "everyone will become a programmer." and we see more advanced computing become a commodity thanks to AI - much like everyone can click their way through an office suite with little experience or training, everyone will be able to use AI to automate large chunks of their job or departmental processes.
If we shiver at the sight of some of those accounting-created excels, which we only learn about when they fail and they can't understand them anymore, wait for them to hand over a vibe-coded 200k loc Python codebase "which is not working anymore" and nobody had ever reviewed a single line of code.
> I think we'll actually see (maybe) individual employees solving some of these problems on their own without involving IT/the dev team.
I agree, but in my book, those employees are now developers. And so by that definition, there will be a lot more developers.
Will we see more or fewer people whose primary job is software development? That's harder to answer. I do think we'll see a lot more consultant-type roles, with experienced software developers helping other people write their own personal automations.