Larry Myers

The specialization of tech team roles has been condensing for a while, and the rapid adoption of AI agents will likely accelerate this process. Software development teams used to have many specialized roles to deliver production quality code: frontend developer, backend developer, DBA, SRE, Ops, QA automation, manual QA, tech lead, product manager, project manager (I’m sure I may be missing a role or two here). Over the past decade the developer roles have been gradually condensed into a full stack developer role, and now you just get hired as a software engineer. Larger organizations that are horizontally organized may still have some of these specialized roles, but frequently people are just expected to know how to do more when shipping software.

I think AI agents will eliminate most of these roles. Eventually you’ll just have a few people responsible for an entire product, and it doesn’t seem to be too far fetched for there just to be two people: one technical focused, one business focused. You’ll have AI agents to perform most of the specialized roles, and as a developer you’ll be expected to have a high level of competency to direct these agents and rapidly ship software.

My hope is that this will result in a tech boom, instead of employment destruction. There are plenty of unsolved problems that were not getting addressed just due to time and cost constraints. It would be great if that is the case, though I suspect it means most devs will have to embrace an entrepreneurial spirit and find themselves working for themselves instead of as a employee in a large organization.