LLMs and related coding tools are seen as something that is revolutionizing the IT industry. According to many adverts, a person without programming skills can now build an entire application. I don’t see a reason not to believe these adverts. I tried some tools and with just a single prompt I was able to create a running and working application.
But what is next?
After having a running application on my local machine, the real question is: what next? I can make it available to customers. Definitely, there are easy-to-use tools to do such things. But here come more questions. How would users be able to log in? How will my app comply with regulations? If I am even aware of them at all. How do I stay on the market and compete for clients? Once I do the next cool feature using agents, how will I roll it out without disrupting current users? What do I do when there is a bug in production? How do I prevent it from happening again?
And many, many more questions that even IT companies struggle to answer sometimes. Writing code is easy and it was never a problem. Of course, everything depends on the complexity of the system, how it was modeled and the level of coupling. However, still as developers, what we enjoy most is writing code. Therefore, if we were lucky enough to get coding tasks (yes, it is normal to work as a software developer and not see coding tasks for weeks), we were more than happy.
Where do we struggle then?
The code is just effect of our work – output. The real challenge is in all activities around building software product. Each product has to have a vision. What is the aim of it, where it goes. What is the target audience? Therefore, we need to talk to people and sell our ideas.
We do not want to vibe-code an application every time from scratch. Hence, we need to define architecture drivers that will help evolve the system and steer a growing codebase into a desired state. Again, to do it, we need to talk to people to understand the environment.
All those things won’t be done by LLMs; they need to be done by us. Projects do not fail because of badly written code, they fail because of poor management and poor product development, therefore losing clients. People cause these troubles, not LLMs.
Media driven development
In all media types there is a single message: AI is coming and it will take our jobs. It is a big change without a doubt. Nevertheless, it is not a revolution but rather an evolution. Evolution in how we write code, how we analyze requirements, how we gather information and how we maintain applications. However, it still requires a human touch. It requires our experience and intuition — because how do we know what an LLM produces is correct? How do we assess it?
We do not work in isolation, alone with our AI agent friend. We need to make decisions and align with other people. That is the hardest thing in software development, not writing code.
Summary
Writing code is an easy task. Every software developer would prefer to have only coding tasks. But it is not possible. There are a lot of things happening around that are much harder. We should look at LLMs as tools that help us to focus more on all these activities around writing code.
Without a doubt we are living in the most interesting times in human history. But I bet that anyone could say the same thing, living in their own time. We say it because we don’t know the future. Of course, we don’t know how far we will go with Artificial Intelligence and what the world will look like in 5 or 10 years. But I bet we will say that we are living in the most interesting times in human history, again.
However, problems will stay the same. After all, we are just people working with other people whom we understand the least.