If I was a betting man I would say that security engineering is going to see a spike in demand in the next few years as a by-product of this.
But that’s probably cope.
I feel the Team Fabric point so strongly. My team has gone from 2 reviewers per PR, to now 1, and open conversations about going to 0 with only AI review.
Feels less like a team every day, and more like a room of individuals, with less and less understanding and insight into what others are doing. Everyone is carving out their own kingdoms in the repo, that only they and their agent understand and can operate on, with internal patterns and designs.
Do we not see how big a risk this is if anyone leaves? Code review was for finding issues for sure, but for me that is at most half the purpose. The other purpose is driving consistency across the codebase, and disseminating knowledge amongst the team.
I feel that despite the stereotype of software engineers as loners, a lot of people I’ve worked with are deeply collaborative, and this is fuel on the burnout fire.
My honest, biggest, fear is that AI coding does not, in the long run, drive up bugs and security issues. That is the only tangible piece of data we have to point to as a counter argument to this tool. If not for that businesses will not care about consistency, only that the agents can read and understand it.
The sad thing is that AI coding does not have to be done sloppily, but somehow, corporate leadership has pushed us in this direction. They wanted some wins to report to wall street, and they had to sacrifice software quality.
The quality bar for software has been greatly reduced across the board, and normalized slop even outside of the corporate world and into open source software.
I wish for a world where AI coding capabilities still existed, but we did not tolerate slop as a society.
