Comment by bitwize

The future of software development is systems analysts.

It was discovered in the 1970s (at the latest) that the hard part of software is figuring out WHAT to build not HOW to build it—and the two should be separate responsibilities with separate personnel bearing separate talents. (Do NOT let your programmers do systems analysis!)

Furthermore, it was discovered that without a clear, precise description of what to build, even the most talented programmers will happily use industry best practice to build the wrong thing, and that is worse than useless: it's a net cost to the business. This is something that programmers have in common with LLMs. So it turns out, in order to build software correctly and cost-effectively, you need to perform lots of systems analysis up front, then through a stepwise refinement process design and document your solution, yielding a detailed spec. It also turns out that LLMs, like human programmers, do just fine if you give them a detailed spec and hold them accountable to that spec!

So much of the "grunt work" of programming can be handed to the LLM—IF you perform the necessary systems analysis up front to determine what needs to be built! (Bryce's Law: Programming is a translation function, taking human-readable requirements to machine-executable instructions.)

As the AI era matures we are either going to see a revival of PRIDE—the original and still most complete software development methodology, but minus the programmers Milt and Tim Bryce loathed so much—or the entire collapse of software as a field.