Agentic coding is poised to reshape software engineering and employment radically.
When I go on a stay-cation, I use some of the time to learn about a new technology.
Nine years ago, I wanted to learn Go, so I started programming and wrote a web server.
The code sat in a git repo.
And here’s an interesting experiment. I haven’t written Go in 9 years. I wanted to upgrade this web server to speak OpenAPI and use a SQLite database.
It would take me at least a month to finish the job.
What if I took this code base and asked Jules (because I had credits) to do the upgrades?
And yes, it was done in just one day because I was on vacation and managed to accomplish this while playing Civ 7, writing a book, going for a workout, spending time with my son, and having lunch with my family.
A significant portion of software development involves extracting data from a database and creating a REST API for that database.
Another significant portion of software development involves refactoring APIs to utilize newer technologies.
That work consumed a significant amount of time and energy from many people.
Now it doesn’t.
What does that mean?
Over the last 20+ years, we have seen too much focus on the ability to solve LeetCode programming problems, rather than on how to reason about large software systems.
Why?
The bottleneck in developing software systems was hiring enough people to produce REST APIs and refactor the code to use the next technology.
The productivity of software engineers constrains a software architect, and the ratio of software architects to coders was about 50:1. With this new technology, the ratio will change to 10:1.
Do I believe that there will be fewer software engineers who only write code? Yes. Will software employ fewer people? No. The productivity gain of being able to build more software systems will increase the pie. But the pie will look different.
If you want a laugh, here’s the repo https://github.com/kostadis/restserver
I won’t claim the correctness of what Jules did. My goal was to understand how it could address this use case.
Having a software engineer review the code and ensure it functions as intended is crucial. I was trying to see what it could do for what is a reasonably typical enterprise software use case.
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