Nobody knows what programming will look like in two years – LeadDev
March 4, 2026
With this latest shift, we all need to work out which of our current skills still have economic value if we want to stay in the field. However, as creator of Extreme Programming and pioneer of Test-Driven Development Kent Beck observed on stage at YOW! in Sydney in December, no-one knows yet. “Even getting to ‘it depends’ would be progress,” he told attendees, “because we don’t know what it depends on yet, and we all need to explore this space together in order to find out.”
“Programming hasn’t really advanced since Smalltalk-80,” Beck said. “The workflows, tools and languages that we use are all small tweaks to a foundation that was laid down in the late 1970s and early 1980s. So the act of programming has lived in extract for 45 years and we’re used to that,” he said.
Beck believes generative AI could be another tool to increase optionality. If writing the code is almost instant, he suggests, we can take time between features to refactor and make improvements. “I can think about everything that might increase the optionality and add it in before I build the next feature,” he said.
More perspectives on how AI might impact the practice of software engineering. As Charles Humble observes, we’ve been here before a number of times when the practice has transformed, and there are lessons to learn from that. Ultimately, what transforms is the economics. And the economics shapes our practices and our profession.
