AI-Native Software Engineering May Be Closer Than Developers Think

AI-native software engineering is moving toward a future where AI agents handle most coding, while developers shift to reviewing and refining output. This evolution is expected to reshape workflows, requiring new tools and skills to manage AI-generated code.

Over the next three years, many organizations will use AI agents to write the majority of their software, moving developers into review roles, Gartner predicts. But challenges and questions remain.

Developers unimpressed by the early returns of generative AI for coding take note: Software development is headed toward a new era, when most code will be written by AI agents and reviewed by experienced developers, Gartner predicts.

Organizations and vendors are already rolling out AI coding agents that enable developers to fully automate or offload many tasks, with more pilot programs and proofs-of-concept likely to be launched in 2025, says Philip Walsh, senior principal analyst in Gartner’s software engineering practice.

By 2026, “there will start to be more productive, mainstream levels of adoption, where people have kind of figured out the strengths and weaknesses and the use cases where they can go more to an autonomous AI agent,” he says. “In the 2027 range, we’ll really see this paradigm take root, and engineers’ workflows and skill sets will have to really evolve and adapt.

In a recent press release, Gartner predicted that 80% of software engineers will have to reskill to fit into new roles created when generative AI takes over more programming functions.

These AI coding agents will be more advanced than the AI coding assistants in wide use today, but they will still need experienced programmers to check their work and tweak the code, Walsh says. In coming to software development, agentic AI — a rising trend that emphasizes autonomous decision-making over simple content generation — will push the boundaries of current AI coding copilots to enable AI-native software engineering to emerge.

While current AI coding assistants can write snippets of code, they often struggle to create software from scratch, but that won’t be the case for evolving coding agents, Walsh says.[…]

AI-native software engineering is moving toward a future where AI agents handle most coding, while developers shift to reviewing and refining output. This evolution is expected to reshape workflows, requiring new tools and skills to manage AI-generated code.

Share this:

Related