Things that I reckon will become a lot more important from a developer's perspective over the next year:
- Shaping work so it is more decomposable, legible, verifiable and understandable
- Property testing, formal verification (exhaustive proofs, and bounded model checking), and test verification (e.g. mutation testing)
- Understanding product market fit and opportunity space
- Application of product management techniques (e.g., constraint, risk, and management by exception)
- Hypothesis forming, validation and falsification
- Evaluation of systems (agentic systems and toolsets used by agents)
- Effectively shaping domain knowledge into agent context in a way that stays current
- A greater awareness of o11y and cost recovery
- User experience, developer experience and agent experience
I'm not suggesting that developers should replace UX engineers or product managers (in fact, I think that demand for experts in these fields will grow with the volume of software). I am also not suggesting that these growth areas are not things developers need to be mindful of now, but that the need for by default application of automated development rigor will grow.
I see this as more or less analogous to the DevOps shift of the mid 2010s. Developers will grow their horizons, become comfortable with achieving more and moving faster safely, and ultimately put more trust in observable and legible delegated systems rather than doing things by hand.
Things that I reckon will become a lot more important from a developer's perspective over the next year:
- Shaping work so it is more decomposable, legible, verifiable and understandable
- Property testing, formal verification (exhaustive proofs, and bounded model checking), and test verification (e.g. mutation testing)
- Understanding product market fit and opportunity space
- Application of product management techniques (e.g., constraint, risk, and management by exception)
- Hypothesis forming, validation and falsification
- Evaluation of systems (agentic systems and toolsets used by agents)
- Effectively shaping domain knowledge into agent context in a way that stays current
- A greater awareness of o11y and cost recovery
- User experience, developer experience and agent experience
I'm not suggesting that developers should replace UX engineers or product managers (in fact, I think that demand for experts in these fields will grow with the volume of software). I am also not suggesting that these growth areas are not things developers need to be mindful of now, but that the need for by default application of automated development rigor will grow.
I see this as more or less analogous to the DevOps shift of the mid 2010s. Developers will grow their horizons, become comfortable with achieving more and moving faster safely, and ultimately put more trust in observable and legible delegated systems rather than doing things by hand.