Paradox: Agentic AI dev roles are less in demand as agents take over

Demand for software development skills in AI-related roles is set to fall next year as agentic AI accelerates across business markets, according to an IEEE industry survey. Or so says research by the global technical professional organization, which polled 400 CIOs, CTOs and IT directors in Brazil, China, Japan, India, the UK …

[elsergiovolador]

Chaos Monkey

AI agent is just next iteration of chaos monkey.

[Handlebars]

One of our suppliers/partners is pushing this. I took it for test drive and since you have to know the tools and domain fairly well in order to write a good prompt, the agentic value is doubtful.

[ParlezVousFranglais]

That's only 'cos the "Prompt Writing AI Assistant" is an upsell...

[Mostly Irrelevant]

IEEE used to be a respectable organization, I guess they're just another industry mouthpiece now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, at first sight at least, but they do explain it a bit more with “The most valuable employees won't necessarily be those who code [but] those who can specify intent precisely [and] evaluate machine outputs rigorously” which seems sensible given the sort of deviant slop that AI is known for profusely cranking out.

They also give the agentic AI use cases most likely (around 40%) to reach mass consumer adpotion in 2026 as: personal assistant, family calendar manager, health monitor, grocery orders, and news curator (essentially), which is rather far from what such hyped-up terminology as SuperIntelligence may have suggested imho.

We'll just have to wait another 5 million years for this wondertastic AI to cure cancer and climate change it seems ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Less demand for proofreading too

“ recrutiment”?

[hx]

And yet the finance bros are looking for an exit

I guess, "Trust us dude, this is going to eliminate all employees and solve personalized mattress sales forever" has to show at least something in return after five years other than "can we have another trillion dollars?"

[iron]

humanoid robots can inject fun into the workplace

In much the same way as an annoying boss injects fun into the BOFH's workplace.

[IGotOut]

How fitting

Are these the same type of AI boosters that kept telling the likes of shop workers and delivery drivers they should retrain as AI programmers when AI takes their job

Maybe these should retrain as Baristas?

[sketharaman]

Tattoo removal

"Forrester said it expects a number of businesses to "quietly rehire" employees that were given the elbow in the name of AI efficiency."

When I was in Germany in the early 2000s, I noticed an overabundance of tattoos and tattoo parlors. When I asked my German coworker about this, he wryly remarked "Tattoo removal will be one of the 10 hottest jobs in 10 years". Not sure how his prediction aged in 2010-5. But, going by reports of massive amounts of technical debit and slop in AI-generated code, I'm boldly predicting that "AI code removal will be one of the 10 hottest jobs in 2035".