The less code the better
Software developers, after all, don’t actually write much code. Or they shouldn’t. Channeling Majors’ comment above, a big part of software development comes down to requirements gathering. In an optimistic estimate, a Tidelift survey found developers spend 39% of their time writing new code. That’s much higher than most estimates I’ve seen. Given the need for design, reviews, maintenance, etc., the actual time spent adding new code ends up occupying a minority of a developer’s time, which is good, because the best code is the code you don’t have to write because you’ve reduced the problem to a minimum. This means less code to maintain, less code susceptible to bugs or hacks, etc. (This, incidentally, is one problem with genAI-driven code: It tends to be overly verbose.)
“Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering,” Majors notes, and genAI has made writing code faster than ever. That’s good. It’s also bad. GenAI has done nothing, she points out, “to aid in the work of managing, understanding, or operating that code. If anything, it has only made the hard jobs harder.”
This isn’t great for junior developers or senior developers.