Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

The research in this post is interesting, especially as it relates to where the software development bottlenecks are in the age of AI: If writing code isn’t the bottleneck, what is? The task-breakdown surveys point at things like meetings or debugging. This just leads to more questions: what are developers doing in those meetings and why can’t it be done by AI? Won’t debugging get automated as capabilities improve? To understand the real bottlenecks, we have to get qualitative, and dig into software engineers’ own understanding of what it is they do that resists automation. When we did this analysis, it revealed three things as the real bottlenecks (1) deciding and specifying what to build, (2) verifying and being accountable for what is delivered, and (3) the deep human understanding — of the codebase, the business, and the environment — required to carry out both of these. Thanks for still believing in RSS! Get in touch if you have any comments or feedback.