technology

I expect that we'll see tooling and languages adapt overtime and we'll be developing code differently.

For example, programming languages might start shifting in the direction of contracts. You specify the signature for the function and the agents figures out how to meet the spec. You could also specify parameters like computational complexity and memory usage. It would be akin to genetic algorithm approach where the agent could converge on a solution over time.

If that’s the direction things will be moving in, then current skills could be akin to being able to write assembly by hand. Useful in some niche situations, but not necessary vast majority of the time.

The way code is structured will likely shift towards small composable components. As long as the code meets the spec, it doesn't necessarily matter what quality of the functions is internally. You can treat them as black boxes as long as they’re doing what’s expected. This is how we work with libraries right now. Nobody audits all the code in a library they include, you just look at the signatures and call the API level functions.

Incidentally, I’m noticing that functional style seems to work really well with LLMs. Having an assembly line of pure functions naturally breaks up a problem into small building blocks that you can reason about in isolation. It’s kind of like putting Lego blocks together. The advantage over approaches like microservies here is that you don’t have to deal with the complexity of orchestration and communication between the services.