Last 40 years, our world has seen an immense rise of the profession of ‘Software Developers’. As Marc Andreesseen famously said “Software is eating the world”. Every business started having a software component to it.
Trillions of dollars flew into the software industry. Every business had it’s unique software needs. These needs were best communicated in English. But, computers could only understand binaries- zeroes and ones. So, we needed specialists who understood the plain business requirements said in english, and translated them to computers by programming them .
Now it turns out, AI is pretty good in understanding business requirements english and turning it into programming , that is understandable by machines . And it will only get exponentially better from here on.
So, what took 10 developers, to complete something- can be built by just one developer who has good grasp of AI tools and programming fundamentals. In the next few years, this 10X factor may become 100 or even 1000 times. So, the number of software developers needed in the job market will shrink a lot.
But, just as the demand for software developers, working for a software company decreases. There will be a huge need for a new breed of , indie software makers . These indie software makers will be one man software companies- they will research the market & come up with winning product ideas, build the product leveraging ai tools, and then market the products.
In last 20 years big media corporations have been largely disrupted , by millions of creators & influencers of social media. As the tools and technologies needed to reach the audience has been largely democratized by the social media companies- anybody can create content. You don’t need to study journalism at university and work for BBC or any other giant media corporations- to build an audience.
Similarly, as the mechanism to translate business requirements to computer code- gets largely democratized – anybody can now create software, you don’t need to be a giant corporation to build software and market it. This will result in the rise of this new class of indie software creators.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI has this famous bet : “AI will make it possible for one person to build a billion dollar company very soon.”
For Software developers there will be 2 options:
first options will be to master state of the art machine learning and become a developer in one of the top 5 companies developing AI models and developer tools.
And there will be another option : rather than looking for job, a viable future strategy for the vast majority then would be to learn to build a niche audience online, learn to research and find market gaps and then quickly build software leveraging ai and deep understanding of the problem.