Do you think you will still work in traditional software in 3 years?

Yes. I've worked 40 years writing software, watched every previous supposed threat to my career fade away after the hype cycle. The software industry seems to move fast but really it mostly recycles the same things endlessly. I could work another decade maintaining legacy code.

You need a longer horizon than three years. Nothing significant happens that fast in software. I expect I will have better hardware in three years, but I will still type code in some 20+ year old language for a living.

Yes. I've been working for 20+ years doing web applications. There have been various tools or movements over that time that had promises of generating code for developers (like GPT may do today) with associated benefits of not having to write software, jobs going offshore, etc. None of them came fully true.

I don't expect AI to help in any significant way in the next 3-5 years where there is an industry wide shift in how we work. Writing boiler plate code for a brand new web app is super simple. In the span of 20+ years, I've maybe done that a handful of times where that was needed for a work project (many more times personally exploring things, etc.)

The hard part about software development isn't typing/generating code, its getting to a level of shared understanding about what is being requested from other humans and what constraints there are with delivering that and making decisions about trade-offs. Then there is all the non-functional elements of running software in production: scalability, maintenance, patching, security, monitoring, etc.

Not with that definition.

How many web devs today are working with HTML+CSS+JS, making static sites? How many make a mobile app using old school native Android or iOS, spinning up async threads for each network/file call?

I was at a hackathon recently. A similar one last year had almost 0 people using AI, with maybe a couple who integrated GPT-3 into their pitch. Last weekend, nearly half used ChatGPT in some manner. Maybe not code but brainstorming.

> Traditional software = non AI-based software. For example, traditional web apps, mobile apps, servers, desktop applications.

I think you're conflating two things

1. working on AI systems and products

2. working with AI assistance

The recent developments in the field haven't changed the numbers for 1 (which is what your question is asking), they're affecting the numbers for 2.

Yes, we might use AI to accelerate things here and there, for example anomaly detection, but the core and base of the software will remain traditional.

Why is traditional = non AI? What if I move to cybersecurity or embedded software? This is a really weird choice of words.

Yeah. You're crazy if you think I'm gonna deal with UB in C or C++ caused by LLM confabulation.

Yes, with some AI acting as my junior developer to offload some tasks to it.