Software's centaur age may last decades

We are currently living in the age of centaurs (2022-20??). Right now, human engineers paired with AI coding systems are more effective than either by themselves. For future generations of software engineers — human or otherwise — this will be the most significant fact about the current period. As in chess’s own centaur age, people are always ready to claim that the centaur age is over and the age of AI supremacy has begun. But the age of centaurs in chess lasted about twenty years, and previous centaur ages have lasted far longer. This should be encouraging to many of us. If software engineering goes along similar lines, we may be able to ride it out another decade or two: enough to make serious plans about what comes next, or to finish out our careers entirely. A brief history of the centaur age It began with GitHub Copilot, which launched in 2022 as AI-powered autocomplete. A confident engineer who knew exactly what they wanted could tab-complete their way through lines of code and…