This material reflects my opinions and not those of my employers.
Before you consider this proposition outrageous, my mother is a proficient and early adopter of mobile applications. She skipped the computer era and jumped right into the mobile device universe, which she can’t live without. Not bad for an 80 year old.
But the short answer to this question is: no. Additionally, non-technical people, whether young or old, will not be able to develop a sustainable and secure solution without the help of a more technical person, even if they fully rely on AI code assistants.
If you are a developer and just felt a sense of relief, you are welcome.
The noise we hear about the impact to software engineering roles is produced inside an echo chamber of the developer related ecosystem. This means that a lot of the noise you and I hear is because we are part of this ecosystem. Do a quick test: go to your siblings, relatives, or friends that are not in the technology space and ask if they can develop an application with an AI code assistant to replace a software they currently rely on. If they say: “I am absolutely confident I can do it”, follow up with a question like: Cool! Suppose the AI code assistant requests you to generate a key to access an application you need to integrate with via an API endpoint, blah, blah, blah. Let me know how that goes.
To illustrate the point I decided to automate the publishing of this blog. While this is not a developer role, it will hopefully show how quickly the conversation can become technical enough to get lay people lost. Here are the steps planned by my AI assistant for the automation process:
Step 1 — Receive the draft. You share the written blog post.
Step 2 — Grammar & style review. Suggest corrections for grammar, clarity, and consistency with your writing voice. You approve the final version.
Step 3 — Produce the audio narration. Generate the MP3 via API (ElevenLabs or OpenAI, if you provide a key) or you drop the file in. Save to files/mp3/ following existing naming conventions.
Step 4 — Build the blog post file. Create the .md file in files/text/ with front matter, audio player block, disclaimer, body, and references.
Step 5 — Update the Weekly Thought on the homepage. Edit files/home.md to update the weekly-thought div — new date stamp, post title, and link pointing to the new post’s URL.
Step 6 — Self-review & verification. Read back both files, check formatting against existing posts, verify audio path and homepage link are correct.
Step 7 — Commit to local-branch. Stage the .md, .mp3, and updated home.md and commit with a descriptive message.
Step 8 — Push to remote. Push the local-branch to origin.
Step 9 — Open PR → pause for your review. Create a PR into main with a summary. Wait for your go-ahead.
Step 10 — Merge on your command. Merge into main so Netlify deploys automatically.
You can see this is not a language most people would understand.
So, the conclusion is: non-technical people, at least for now, will not be able to take a developer role. Will it be easier for someone to become a developer? Maybe. Instead, what will happen is that technical people will be able to do more. A person who maintains websites for other people will be able to serve more clients. Will that reduce the need for that particular role? I doubt it. There is enough pent up demand that I can’t see this becoming a problem yet.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, we created enough technical complexity in the past that even if automation happens it will still require specific knowledge. We will either have to teach everyone how to create and use an API key, or we will need the AI assistant to be secure enough to do it on our behalf. As a cybersecurity professional, I still don’t trust it.
Remember the maxim of software engineering: garbage in, garbage out. When fed garbage, better technology just creates more garbage.
PS. This will be my first blog posted through my newly, fully automated, AI assisted process. I will let you know how it actually went in my next post.