The Inflection Point in Software Development

I read this book a few months ago, but anyway I want to talk about how this book makes me think about my own path as a software developer, where to go when everything gets automated, how reluctant we are to change, and how the future looks at this certain point.

Andrew Grove's book talks about his company, Intel, where he successfully led it through a hard inflection point as CEO of a big company. He shows what it looks like from the inside, the way that he, as CEO, needs to study something completely new from scratch even when he already had a good and profitable company, and change it completely because his company was slowly dying.

One of the things that keeps me spinning in my head is

The person who is the star of previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to logic of a strategic inflection point and tends to fall harder than most.

And yes, that's completely real, I feel like someone came and just threw everything off, being completely helpless, why? Some could say: Yes, that's because you're not a real engineer, you're just a coder who follows rules. But let me tell you that you're wrong. My position right now is: Well, AI can't do the engineering job, can't have the whole context of your business, probably can't know what you wanna build, there exist some limits in the recent LLMs and agents, and yes, that's true, but that is the reality of today, we're living it now, what will happen in three years, four years? Even now there are a lot of posts saying that everyone is now a developer, now everyone can build, what will happen when a superintelligence gets released for everyone? With a prompt building a completely functional application, will there still be a need for some SaaS services when everyone learns to use Claude and program their own apps inside their industry? I think not at all, it will be less valuable, an app wouldn't be able to generate more than a few thousand dollars just in software unless you sell hardware through software (I consider selling hardware through software a service, like a VPS), those will obviously survive, because people need to host their projects in the cloud, and we're gonna have a lot more "developers" or vibe coders coming in the next years.

But what happens with software as we know it? I don't know, if everyone can build it, then it's not valuable. So the only answer to this is to move into the physical world, build for it, and try to be fast because there will be much more competition in the future, more than we actually have.

The focus is on the physical world, robots, biology, chemistry, etc. But as you can notice, please, if you're new in your career, choose the longest path, as Sam Altman mentions in his article how to be successful, try to get the career where you can get a compound effect. Software development used to have it, but maybe not anymore, because models are getting smarter, more autonomous, and more efficient than you and me.

Other things that are very valuable to know but I don't want to describe one by one are these:

Strategic changes don't just start at the top. They start with your calendar
Every 10x change in an industry is almost certainly an inflection point
In technology, whatever can be done will be done

So yeah, as you can see, there is not a clear path for software development, all I can tell you are just thoughts, not a concrete answer, the only thing we can do is to keep going and try our best.

Thanks for reading!, I really appreciate your time.

Disclaimer: These are my thoughts, if you have any suggestion, let me know on my twitter. I want to know your thoughts about it, don't be afraid to contact me, I'll be completely open to receive it, and maybe talk a little bit about it.