This is the biggest problem going forward. I wrote about the problem many times on my blog, in talks, and as premises in my sci-fi novels
Sitting in your cubical with your perfect set of test suites, code verification rules, SOP's and code reviews you wont want to hear this, but other companies will be gunning for your market; writing almost identical software to yours in the future from a series of prompts that generate the code they want fast, cheap, functionally identical, and quite possibly untested.
As AI gets more proficient and are given more autonomy (OpenClaw++) they will also generate directly executable binaries completely replacing the compiler, making it unreadable to a normal human, and may even do this without prompts.
The scenario is terrifying to professional software developers, but other people will do this regardless of what you think, and run it in production, and I expect we are months or just a few years away from this.
Source code of the future will be the complete series of prompts used to generate the software, another AI to verify it, and an extensive test suites.
If you need to interact with some things in platform.openai.com, you know it is not months away, it is there already now. I had to go through forms and flows there, so buggy and untested, simply broken. They really eat their own dog food. Interacting with the support, resulted in literally weeks of ping pong between me and AI smoothed replies via email to fix their bugs. Terrible.
I wish I had a crystal ball to know how this will play out in the future, will a different AI create it from the SOP? How will humans fit in?
For me with any new release of my winery production software I re-ran every job put into my clients production systems from job #1, about 200,000 jobs; Before going into production we checked all the balances, product compositions and inventory from this new software matches what the old system currently says. Takes about an hour to re-run fifteen years production and even a milliliter, or milligram difference was enough to trigger a stop/check. We had an extensive set of input data I could also feed in, to ensure mistakes were caught there too.
I expect other people do it there own way, but as a business this would be the low bar of testing I would expect to be done.
Sitting in your cubical with your perfect set of test suites, code verification rules, SOP's and code reviews you wont want to hear this, but other companies will be gunning for your market; writing almost identical software to yours in the future from a series of prompts that generate the code they want fast, cheap, functionally identical, and quite possibly untested.
As AI gets more proficient and are given more autonomy (OpenClaw++) they will also generate directly executable binaries completely replacing the compiler, making it unreadable to a normal human, and may even do this without prompts.
The scenario is terrifying to professional software developers, but other people will do this regardless of what you think, and run it in production, and I expect we are months or just a few years away from this.
Source code of the future will be the complete series of prompts used to generate the software, another AI to verify it, and an extensive test suites.