According to Meta's CTO, the future of the software engineering profession will be the story of Haves and Have-Nots.
Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew “Boss” Bosworth believes there is a “strong layering of capabilities” between developers who have mastered AI tools and developers who have not.
“Engineers who master the tool, to the point that they can't replace it with a tool themselves, command premium,” he said Monday on Ask Me Anything Session on Instagram. “And those who don't master the tools will end up working under the tool layer in data collection, labeling tasks. For some reason, the machine is not good and not highly leveraged.”
He compared the benefits of AI in engineering to the benefits of the Internet.
“We were able to make Google's obscure compiler errors into Google and started getting useful threads about what people have done in the past. We started navigating complex APIs with much better documentation available through internet-supported communities,” he said.
In the short term, Bosworth believes that AI will “make our lives easier, just as the internet has made our lives easier.”
Furthermore, he says that AI gives software engineers “leverage” and brings the benefits of “complexity and productivity” in their work. He emphasized that he believes that AI will help the industry grow, not tanks.
“We meet companies with a few employees and billions of users,” Bosworth said.
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But “it's hard to say how it will land,” he added.
Bosworth boss Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shares similar predictions about how AI will affect software engineers.
He said in January that he hopes Meta has AI, saying that he can “become a kind of mid-level engineer in a company that can write code” later this year.
He also said he hopes that AI will help build with “a very small, talented team.”
“If you were starting anything that you started 20 years ago, you would have had to build up all these different capabilities within your company, and now there's an incredible platform to do that,” he said in May.
Zuckerberg has been talking about promoting “efficiency” at Meta since at least 2022.
Earlier this year, Meta internally announced plans to enable job seekers to use AI in several coding interviews.
