Thoughts and ideas about AI killing software development:
We are building systems that are easier to start but harder to sustain.
The future of software engineering, therefore, lies not in the "end of coding," but in the evolution of complexity management.
The engineers of tomorrow will not be "vibe coders" who don't know how to code, but system architects who manage the entropy of the AI's output.
Here is the logical proof:
In computational complexity (P vs. NP), we value problems where finding a solution is hard but verifying it is easy (e.g., Sudoku, factoring).
AI coding is the opposite ("The AI Inverse-NP problem"):
- Generation is Trivial
- Verification is Hard
We are building "high entropy" systems where the cost of verification exceeds the cost of creation. We use AI to cope with that high entropy to a certain degree. Nevertheless, the complexity increases (I would argue exponentially) with the growing amount of problems being solved.
As the overall complexity (of a system) remains, software engineers will be in higher demand than ever! But the job will be different.
Some interesting reads:
- Fred Brooks wrote "No Silver Bullet, in 1986, where he is distinguishing between "accidental complexity" (syntax, compilation) and "essential complexity" (logic, state, requirements). He argued that tools could only solve accidental complexity; essential complexity is irreducible.
- Law of Conservation of Complexity: Tesler’s Law suggests that every application has a "core of complexity" dictated by the problem domain it serves. A tax preparation application, for instance, cannot be simpler than the tax code it implements. The central question in system design, therefore, is not "how do we remove complexity?" but "who handles the complexity?
- Kolmogorov complexity is the length of the shortest computer program that can produce a given string or piece of data.
I'm curious what everyone thinks.
- Do you agree with this perspective?
- How do you see the role of software developers and engineers evolving over the next 5–10 years?
- Will AI fundamentally change the profession, or will it simply shift the skills that are most valuable?
