What I believe about the future of software development

Thorsten Ball argues that software development will be fundamentally reshaped by generative models: human review of code and line-by-line PR inspection will vanish, unit tests will become less central, and the craft of writing code will give way to the craft of designing software systems and products. Models already produce large, correct codebases - he cites a model generating 900 lines of Arduino C that compiled and ran without errors - so most defects will be specification or design errors ("you asked for the wrong thing") rather than coding mistakes. Open source as currently practiced loses its role because artificial agents provide the "eyeballs," and the small set of performance-critical human contributions will remain an edge case handled by models when necessary.

He predicts a token-centered computing paradigm where developer tooling like terminals, CLIs, and manual editors become archaic and interactions will be mediated by tokens and agents; UI will be generated on-the-fly because smarter systems need fewer manual interfaces. Organizational norms shift: PM/design/engineering triads and Agile rituals become obsolete as engineers stop acting as “meat proxies” for machines, and startups that mimic big-tech processes will look increasingly out of touch. Access to tokens will create a two-tier ecosystem where those without token resources are second-class producers, and the transition to this new software model will take a generation.