What I believe about the future of software development

This was originally posted on X and blew up. To plant my flag, to say that these are things I believed in September 2026, here it is on the blog, non-ephemeral. Some of these predictions are just observations, they’ve long been true at companies like Amp. Others will take some time to play out.

Code review will die. I mean: it’s already dead. But in the future, humans won’t find a bug or an issue with the code produced by a model, at least not in a reasonable time. Humans will only review the system and its composition, but it won’t be in PRs and it won’t be by looking through every line of the code.

Unit tests might die too. Why have training wheels if you never fall over? I’ve had models write 900 lines of Arduino C, compile it without a single error, and send it to the device, where the program ran perfectly. 900 lines will be nothing in the future.

The craft of writing code will disappear. Yes, there are still Italian shoe makers around. But look at your feet.

The craft of building software will be more important than ever. Knowing how to solve business problems with software, how other software did it and why and why not, when and how to ship it, how to get feedback on it – that’s the new game.

Most bugs won’t be “coding” bugs. They’ll be “you asked for the wrong thing” bugs.

Open source in its current form doesn’t make sense anymore. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is still true but now we have artificial eyeballs.

Performance critical contributions by humans will stay what they are: an edge case. In 99% of software it does not matter that you could’ve written a faster algorithm or picked a better data structure. You have no customers, no users, no one’s executing the code. It does not matter. When it matters, the models can fix it. Do not compare the top of the top 1% of software (developers) to 99%.

The terminal is dead. Most developer tooling will be washed away by tokens. Shells, text editors, CLI tools won’t be used by humans anymore. There’s no need to know command line flags and jq invocations anymore. It’ll be seen as arcane as knowing how to write everything as a Perl one-liner. (I’m saying this as a lover of the terminal & dev tools.)

Tokens are the new computing paradigm. Everything will be re-made on top of it. We’ve had deterministic computers for 80 years, so we confuse “how computers have worked” with “how computers must work.” We’re entering the post-binary era.

The triad of PM/Design/Eng will disappear. It does not make any bit of sense anymore. Agile, SCRUM, whatever – dead. “Engineers” who act as “meat proxies” and shove tickets into agents and report back to humans will no longer be valuable.

The difference between software engineering at large corporations and small ones will increase. Start-ups adopting practices of Google will look even sillier than before, because they can now build so much faster and with so much less constraints.

There’s no proof that “good code” will matter in the future. The notion of “good code” itself is mostly based on the idea that it’s easy/cheap/efficient for humans to work with. But humans won’t modify the majority of code. Think of how dumb it is to assume that “only 80 columns wide” or “but newlines here and there” matters for agents – now consider all the other properties you have in mind for “good code”. Yes.

Some people will be priced out of producing software. Just like only some people could afford a personal computer in the 80s and 90s, for the next few years, if you can’t get enough tokens, you’re playing second league. You need to get to the tokens.

It’s questionable whether cheaper models will be used. Tokens will be everywhere and we’ll swim in tokens. And what we consider a smart model today will be considered very dumb in the future. But a smarter model makes less mistakes, needs fewer turns. When do you really think “I’m okay with it being wrong a few times?”

Models will become so fast that UI will be generated on the fly. A lot of UI exists because software can’t understand what you want. Menus, settings screens, dashboards, filters: much of it is a human-accessible API to a dumb machine. Smart machines need much less UI.

It’ll take a while for this to play out. It’ll take a generation for the “new software” to replace the “old software”. Just like there are people happily employed as ASP developers today, there will be people employed to write code in 10 years. But do you want to have that job?