Майк Крігер / X, Bloomberg
Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and now Chief Product Officer at Anthropic, predicts that the work of software engineers will change dramatically in the next three years — and it will be all about artificial intelligence.
Krieger (viaBusiness Insider) says that in the future software engineers will spend more time reviewing code than creating it, and will take on «more abstract» work that AI cannot yet handle.
«How do we evolve from being mostly code writers to code reviewers? I think the job of a programmer will look like this in three years: creating the right ideas, designing the user experience, and then figuring out what those things will look like at scale — and it will probably be some combination of maybe bringing back some static analysis or analysis tools for what the AI has actually done».
Indeed, with the advent of AI, the way some tech companies work with software has undergone significant changes. For example, in October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that more than a quarter of the company’s new code is already created by AI.
Krieger also notes that the beginning of the year at Anthropic began with identifying those processes that can be «cloned» (from the name of the company’s AI chatbot Claude) and those that can be — left to humans. At the same time, while artificial intelligence can speed up certain stages of the development process, Mike believes that it will not completely eliminate programmers’ jobs, but will only slightly change the skills needed to keep human coders relevant.
«I think that this profession will become multidisciplinary — you need to know what to create and how to implement it», — says Krieger. «I like that about our engineers. Many, maybe even most, of our good product ideas come from them and the prototypes they have created».
Earlier, a representative of Anthropic told Business Insider that the company sees itself as a «testing ground» for studying the work stages that AI can take over.
«At Anthropic, we are focused on developing powerful and responsible artificial intelligence that works with humans, not instead of them. As Claude rapidly develops its coding capabilities for real-world tasks, we’re seeing developers gradually move to higher levels of responsibility».
According to Krieger, certain work is still most effective when done by human hands.
«I think that the alignment: deciding what to build; solving real user problems and figuring out a coherent product strategy — is still very difficult», he said. «And probably the (AI) models have about a year left to solve this».