Will the job of developer still exist in 20 years?

This article aims to take a step back and look at recent developments in tooling and try to understand how our profession will evolve in the long run.

To give you some context, I felt the need to write about this topic after seeing the tweet below, which went viral within the web developer community on Twitter and scared quite a few of them...

This is mind blowing.

With GPT-3, I built a layout generator where you just describe any layout you want, and it generates the JSX code for you.

W H A T pic.twitter.com/w8JkrZO4lk

— Sharif Shameem (@sharifshameem) July 13, 2020

In this video, we see an artificial intelligence based on the GPT-3 (Generative Pre-Training) modeling language produce JSX code from a sentence written by a human being. Impressive, isn't it?

So, with the power of artificial intelligence and the explosion of no-code (and low-code) tools, is the developer profession at risk of disappearing tomorrow?

A look at artificial intelligence

There's a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and the impact of its evolution on the job market, with predictions going as far as the automation of 47% of jobs in the U.S. by the mid-2030s.

But what about developers?

Work on automating repetitive tasks to speed up web and software development is nothing new. Digging a bit, we find scientific papers dealing, for example, with AI-based COBOL program generation as far back as 1976.

In 2018, Microsoft even made a tool called "Sketch2Code" available to the public, allowing users to turn a low-quality sketch into an HTML page containing all the drawn elements.

As we can see, when it comes to code generation, artificial intelligence is still at the stage of TRYING to save us time on repetitive tasks such as generating structures (graphical or logical), something other tools have already managed to do for quite a while now.

Remember, it wasn't so long ago that we still had to search for, download, include, and update our JS scripts by hand...

At this point in time, tools developed by developers, for developers, have made us far more efficient than tools based on artificial intelligence.

The future of no-code

Airtable, Glide, Wix, Typeform, Shopify, and Stripe are all part of the tools dominating the "no-code" market—in other words, tools that let you build websites and mobile apps without ever touching a line of code.

I couldn't find a study on the market for these specific tools, but as far as "low-code" is concerned, the global market was worth $13.2 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $45.5M by 2025—a significant amount, but still a drop in the ocean compared to the $456 billion figure if we only count software development (desktop and mobile in 2018).

The arrival of these tools is, in my opinion, good news for the industry, as it allows more people to become active players in technology even without all the technical knowledge, and fosters emulation around usage innovation.

For most users, whether individuals or businesses, their budget constraints wouldn't allow them to afford the services of a professional developer anyway, so the impact on the development market remains only moderate.

Conclusion

I don't think the developer profession will disappear within 20 years, but it probably won't look like what we know today either, and this evolution actually began 20 years ago already.

In the 2000s, it was still possible to find a job as a web integrator just by knowing HTML and CSS; today, unless you're a wizard in animations and pixel-perfect integration, the integrator role barely exists anymore—we've become front-end developers.

And yet, the type of profile most in demand today remains the fullstack developer (assuming they really exist), requiring even more advanced skills, with tools and frameworks that keep growing more complex.

I believe that, in a more or less distant future, two main profiles will emerge:

• Experts in no/low-code tools who have some technical knowledge but above all know how to master the tools perfectly, combined with strong creativity in terms of user experience and graphic design.
• Engineers specialized in very specific and advanced fields such as embedded systems, robotics, video games, data processing, artificial intelligence, etc.

Granted, this split already exists to some extent, but I believe we'll see it reach a point we can't yet imagine today.