Amid the ongoing work to both deploy and accelerate artificial intelligence (AI), Gartner has released its latest predictions on how software developers and engineers will be impacted by AI both in the near-term and future.

Specifically, analysts at the technological research and consulting firm expect that AI will affect things in three fundamental ways.

Firstly that, in the short-term, AI will operate within boundaries—i.e., AI tools generating modest productivity increases by augmenting existing developer work patterns and tasks. The productivity benefits of AI will be most significant for senior developers in organisations with mature engineering practices, the firm also suggested.

Meanwhile, in the medium-term, the emergence of AI agents will help to push the boundaries. AI agents will aid with transforming developer work patterns by enabling developers to fully automate and offload more tasks, marking the emergence of AI-native software engineering where most code will be AI-generated rather than human-authored.

On this in particular, Gartner senior principal analyst Philip Walsh, said: “In the AI-native era, software engineers will adopt an ‘AI-first’ mindset, where they primarily focus on steering AI agents toward the most relevant context and constraints for a given task.

“This will make natural-language prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) skills essential for software engineers.”

Thirdly, in the long-term, advances in AI will break boundaries and will mark the rise of AI engineering itself. While AI will make engineering more efficient, organisations will need even more skilled software engineers to meet the rapidly-increasing demand for AI-empowered software.

“Building AI-empowered software will demand a new breed of software professional, the AI engineer,” said Walsh. “The AI engineer possesses a unique combination of skills in software engineering, data science and AI/machine learning (ML), skills that are sought after.”

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The tech research and consulting firm have also suggested that, through 2027, the vast majority (80%) of the engineering workforce will need to upskill due to generative AI establishing new roles in software engineering and operations.

That said, and even in light of how AI is predicted to evolve, Walsh noted that humans’ innate creativity and knowledge will still remain key to software-focused efforts.

“While AI will transform the future role of software engineers, human expertise and creativity will always be essential to delivering complex, innovative software,” Walsh explained.