The future of software development (or the skills that matter)

Published at Sep 1, 2025

#learning#software

TL;DR: The future of software development is AI-augmented, integration-driven, domain-focused, and sustainability-conscious.

Integration

APIs are everywhere, powering SaaS tools, IoT devices, AI models, and even government data portals. The challenge is orchestration (e.g. stitching them together, managing data flows, ensuring resilience and security). Funny enough, most of my recent work has circled back to this theme — whether writing adapters for VSCarbon or designing endpoints for a climate-resilient app that pulls data from multiple sources.

Product-driven and systems thinking

AI is taking the repetitive tasks off our plates, letting us focus on higher-impact problems. That shift, as I see it, also changes roles: we see more product engineers and domain specialists. Hence, developers now look less like pure coders and more like hybrids: part engineer, part systems thinker, part tool orchestrator.

And that prompts the question: What skill will matter most? Apparently, it’s the fundamental knowledge and thinking in systems — asking the right questions, solving the right problems, integrating the right tools, and validating the results. When I was building VSCarbon, I realised pretty quickly: it’s not just about fetching carbon intensity data from an API. The harder, more important questions are:

  • Who’s using it? Is it for curious individuals who want to adjust their habits, or for teams making operational decisions?

  • What about trust and workflow? If a team doesn’t trust the data, or if checking it feels like a chore instead of fitting seamlessly into their routine, adoption stalls.

Sustainability

Every major industry is under pressure to measure and reduce its environmental impact, and software is no exception. Cloud usage, AI workloads, IoT networks — they all consume energy. At the same time, software is one of the best levers we have to enable sustainable choices at scale. So just like security and accessibility became must-haves, sustainability will be baked into the definition of good software.