The future of software development: Now with less software development

More than 3,000 software developers from around the world gathered in San Francisco on Tuesday to learn what will become of software development in the AI era.

They convened under the auspices of AI Dev 26 x SF, a conference organized by Andrew Ng's DeepLearning.AI.

Jonathan Heyne, COO of DeepLearning.AI, set the scene by framing the problem: figuring out what software engineering will mean five years from now.

Spoiler: No one knows, but a lot was said about the current state of play.

The bottleneck for software development has always been writing code, Heyne said. With AI, "the bottleneck is our imagination."

That, funding, and time. But let's focus on our imagination to keep this light. At one point, we might also have cited legal limitations, but so far, the courts seem satisfied with AI code laundering.

Anush Elangovan, corporate VP of AI software for ...