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Oof. I have no idea. But since it'll be fun to guess:

Absent some kind of magical (from today's POV) AGI, I think I'd probably say yes, but I'm not sure that means software engineering will continue to look the way it does today, at least not universally.

My expectation is a pretty linear extrapolation of history. I think new tools and higher levels of abstraction will emerge that will make certain types of tasks unnecessary or a lot faster. We'll still need people working on compilers and embedded software, but a lot of really basic forms of software development (think Excel replacements) will be A LOT faster and easier to do.

Fundamentally, though, business problems are really fucking specific, and you need a really fucking specific language to express and solve those problems. The process of applying those languages to problems is a creative one. I don't think this dynamic will change for a really long time, if ever.



That's what tools like Visual Basic and Delphi were meant to do, and actually were pretty good at for their time. As far as I can tell, we still haven't nearly caught up to the browser/cloud equivalent of these tools.

Things need to sit still for a while longer I guess, but I think there's also some industry changes to blame. In the 90s there was big money in making tools and components for software engineers, while nowadays everyone just uses the best free thing they can find. Granted the free things are way better than they were in the 90s, but I think they're largely killing the market for better things that cost money.


Look at low code tools. There's money, market demand, and many tool vendors.




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