k, lets cut straight to the chase, remember Industrial revolution that started in mid 1700s, about two and a half centuries ago? That industrial revolution, which brought about a major transition period for the world bringing about the introduction of machines into the manual labor market, and brought about a drastic change in the world economy. Well ... there was a lot that happened. So I'll try to keep it concise.
There was an drastic increase in output speeds due to the transition from manual labor to automatic production lines. According to its wikipedia article, the increased output per person ranged from a few multiples up to a whopping 500 times in industries like textile. The world slowly descended into a serious case of economic and financial instability, leading to high unemployment and falling wages. It took a lot of time, almost generations, for the world to adjust and recover and that too happened by adjusting to the changed times. Like, giving birth to new professional pathways that leveraged the increased efficiency of machines. Jobs started to transition from general labor that did end-to-end production to specialization-heavy roles like operators, supervisors, and managers. Although the initial adoption of machines led to a drop in the quality of production, but as the technology matured, the quality and speed were slowly able to sync with each other.
Now imagine the industrial revolution but with AI instead of machines in the software development context. Manual coding is slowly being replaced (or more aptly, overshadowed) by AI coding agents. The software development lifecycles has accelerated exponentially and the projects or startups that used to take a whole team to kick off and develop an MVP, now only need someone with a clear vision of their product, an AI coding assistant and a clear understanding of how to leverage it for their purpose. The density of old tech job postings that did a particular task have also greatly reduced and instead new roles that cover a wide umbrella having started to emerge (transformed would be a better word i guess).
Now if you have read till this point, you must be having a lot of lingering questions? So, how do I utilise this information? What to do? Well, I'm not going to be your future advisor and tell you what to do and how to do it. But here's something to think about. Why not just take lessons from the analogy itself! What did people do when the industrial revolution came along? Or in other words, thinking back about the industrial revolution, what would you suggest a person of that era, working in the field of manual labor do, to compete for their spot among the machines in the factories? Should they try to upskill on how to do the manual jobs better or should they move on and started upskilling on how to leverage those machines to improve their chances of riding along the revolution wave?
There was a quote I read somwhere. I don’t know who originally said it, but it stayed with me.
Note, in the whole blog, I have given special attention to use "software development" and not "software engineering". Its a very thin line that the current AI agents are not capable of crossing. AI coding agents, as of the end of 2025 are capable of programming but not engineering. Software development is the field of programming and developing software. Whereas software engineering is a very vast field which not only involves software development, but also a wide range of additional related tasks including system architecture designing and scaling, software testing, continuous integration and deployments, automated pipelines, monitoring and analytics, etc. What the current AI is capable of doing is only programming and to be honest, if prompted properly, it has the capability to do pretty well. But the tech industry still needs software engineers who are able to architect and manage the whole stack and fill the void that the current state of AI is still leaving behind.
P.S. Considering my closeness to the software engineering field, my blog tackles the analogy with centering the effect of AI revolution on my industry. But I believe that giving the analogy a brief second to marinate with your after thoughts will allow you to see similar effects on the other industries as well. Feel free to contact me and lets discuss this. I would love to hear second opinions. Also, just want to mention, I had been thinking about this for quite some time and this thought has been in the back burner of my mind since the announcement of Devin, the AI powered software engineer that was announced in 2024. That's the reason for such short gap between the previous blog and this one. So, please do not expect the blogs to be this frequent 😅.
Anyways, thank you for your time. Happy Holidays and see you all next year!!