The profession of software developer is not going to disappear — it is going to become richer than ever.
As a programmer you conceive something — a website, a game, an algorithm — and the computer executes it. That is the essence of the craft: translating a human intention into a working computer system. That does not change. But the toolbox has exploded over the past few years.
Andrej Karpathy (former AI director at Tesla, co-founder of OpenAI, and the person who coined the term “vibe coding”) has a clear framework for this. He distinguishes three kinds of software:
1.0 — Classical code. Instructions that tell the computer exactly what to do. Think of your word processor, your banking app, or the software that guides a rocket to the moon. Until recently written by humans, but increasingly written by AI or in collaboration with AI.
2.0 — Neural networks. Systems that are not programmed with rules but trained on vast quantities of examples. A self-driving car does not recognise a pedestrian because someone wrote rules describing what a pedestrian looks like — it recognises one because the system has seen millions of examples.
3.0 — Language models such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. These are complex systems built on neural networks. What makes them remarkable is that you can direct them in plain language: you “program” them with a prompt.
To handle the enormous variety of the real world you sometimes need software 1.0, sometimes 2.0, sometimes 3.0 — or a combination, as in AI agents.
From now on we will increasingly work alongside AI agents that write the bulk of the code. The developer retains control: specifying the desired outcome, verifying the code — without compromising on quality. Karpathy calls this “Agentic Engineering”: agentic because as a developer you mostly no longer write the code yourself but deploy agents to do it, engineering because it remains a genuine discipline with its own depth and expertise.
But what does this mean for the profession? Does every developer need to master all three forms of software, or will new specialisations emerge? How does the balance between designing, building and testing shift? At Firda and NHL Stenden we are fully engaged with these questions. Because if the craft changes, education must move with it.
Links: