Whilst I’m enjoying traditional web programming enhanced by my AI partner (using Cursor still, but may move onto another one soon since it feels like it’s gotten worse)… I am constantly aware that the software world is going to be dramatically different very soon. I don’t think I will, in particular, be out of a job… but it is definitely a chance possibility. However inertia of software stacks will probably keep me employed for the next decade or so.
Inertia & Junior Software Roles
I don’t know with 100% accuracy, but I believe some financial and insurance institutions are still running on COBOL software. These are extreme examples but I think there is going to be caution on the uptake of new forms of software in many areas – there will be inertia and things will change slowly for some industries. So there will be web software that needs to be maintained … I don’t know how massive this market is, it may well drastically shrink as companies merge, but I’m fairly certain old school web tech will be a niche job that can pay potentially well. Coupled with the ongoing worries about juniors finding it incredibly difficult to find jobs I think an entire generation of programmers will go missing, which will decrease the supply of traditional web development talent. So hopefully good for me.
I was speaking to someone from the printing industry who worked in it many decades ago. He transitioned through from traditional printing (magazines) using HUGE rollers in factories, to digital printing…, *almost* overnight (months to within. year) most of the workforce lost their jobs because technology steam rolled them. And we lost all that clever skill that put magazines together – if you aren’t aware of the skill that went into magazine printing it was a labour intensive process … now we can just colour laser print onto glossy paper and think nothing of it.
And so it will be with programming … so you need to stay up to date.
Future Software – Automation & Machine Learning… + Cyber Security
If I had to start all over again, and had the energy to do it … I’d be focusing now on applying automation tools to companies, which is a first stepping stone to AI’ing companies… the tools are so simple now that almost anyone can make really quite good solutions or prototypes for their companies.
Then I’d be focusing on learning actually Machine Learning stuff, for instance image/video recognition i.e. counting the number of chickens going past a certain point on a video; and then the potential for smart cities is very much there already. And finally cyber security will just get more and more important.
Some thoughts on Brain Inputs
In other cases, I think software will leap ahead. We haven’t even touched upon the brain-input mechanisms which would change everything in mind-bending ways … there’s the story of a teenager with a disability able to use Musk’s brain chip to play Call of Duty with his friends; as with most things these days, I take them with a pinch of salt; but I do think the blending of the biological and digital (eventually quantum…) worlds will remove the input restrictions that we currently face. Sometimes you can think far faster than being able to actually implement.
That’s it for now, demo coming soon.
It’s not that we’ve been in stealth, we’ve just been working on something quietly. It’s still traditional web albeit blended with AI workflows.
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