GenAI Reality Bites Back For Software Developers

This year saw nearly every software tooling vendor incorporate (or plan to incorporate) a generative (genAI) “copilot” capability into their tools. And there’s good reason for them to do so, as Forrester’s most recent Developer Survey indicates that 49% of developers are expecting to use or are already using a genAI assistant in the coding phase of software development. Forrester refers to genAI coding assistants as TuringBots, and we feel that genAI will become a pervasive force through all phases of software delivery, not just coding.

But AI assistants are only the beginning of the genAI software development revolution. GenAI will change the very definition of what software development is over the next 10 years. In the area of software development for 2025, we predict that:

At least one organization will try to replace 50% of its developers with AI and fail.

In Forrester’s Developer Survey, 2024, developers indicated that they spend about 24% of their time coding; the remaining time is spent doing designs, writing tests, fixing bugs, and meeting with stakeholders. So even though we expect developer productivity to improve with the usage of genAI coding assistants, it’s easy to see that developers are doing a lot more than just writing code. That’s why leaders need to take a step back from the hype and consider what’s really going on at the developer’s desk to see how realistic the hype is. Even with copilots, developers are the human in the loop making sure that the coding suggestions are correct, that the code actually performs the intended operations, and that when bad suggestions come back (and they will), the developer is there to make sure they don’t get placed into production. Don’t let genAI reality bite you, and set expectations accordingly.

Fifty percent of enterprises will abandon individual best-of-breed tools for DevOps platforms.

Platforms continue to gain on best-of-breed tools. Platform engineering is all the rage with users, and selling platforms are all the rage with software tools vendors. In fact, you can look at any of the once-niche markets for software development tools and see that many of the vendors that were once best of breed have been merging and acquiring each other for years. And it’s not just continuous integration and continuous delivery; it’s application portfolio management all the way down the line to application performance management. No one is satisfied with a slice of the pie; they want the whole pie.

Rust will enter the top 10 of the TIOBE Index while C and C++ drop in rank.

This year, we believe (or perhaps, really hope) that organizations will finally factor risk into their choice of programming language. With talk of genAI, who has time for worrying about programming language selection? Yet security-minded software engineers realize that the selection of programming language is a relevant and core concern. Until recently, getting everyone on board with this concern has been difficult. That is, until the White House issued a memo on the importance of using memory-safe languages. Forrester views this as a necessary message for software delivery leaders to wake up and get moving in the right direction.

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