This AI backend engineer
When Frontend Engineering disrupts backend Engineering
As startups, companies and every organization are orienting all their operations toward customer satisfaction, all the operations that are not directly related to outputs that affect customer’s perception of a product or service are being minimized by management teams because concentring all efforts on operations that are critical to the delivery of value to customers is an always key element to success. Outweighting back operations that have no clear participation to this value that the customer perceives is the goal of every company because of cost efficiency and customer-centricity. Software development will not escape from this new but old paradigm of customer-centricity but here we should certainly replace customer-centricity with user-centricity. The application of this user-centricity paradigm forces software companies to put more effort and investment in frontend teams and user support teams while trying to minimize needed efforts and investment in backend teams and processes to near zero.
A month ago I talked to a key manager at Microsoft who has seen his team lose three backend engineers that used to support the 26 frontend engineers he manages to get things done. Then he is forced to manage his new team of only frontend engineers to build working frontend ideas without having direct authority and access to backend resources. I thought that what this manager need is to manage himself and his team to be able to build without asking something from the backend engineers who are now not obliged to do the works that his team needs because they are now working for another purpose. To say that what I think that Microsoft needs from this manager is for him to manage himself and his team to build this platform that will allow them to get the backend resources and processes that they need automatically while building their frontend idea because I think Microsoft believes, and I also, that Artificial intelligence and automation are already at the state of the art that could allow this kind of solution to be built. Building your frontend solution while this AI backend engineer build for you all the backend stacks that your frontend solution needs is something achievable and this is what I call the disruption of backend by frontend then we backend engineers are really in trouble because AI is replacing us drip by drip and we would be better if we manage ourselves to be frontend engineers or to focus on AI or data science.
This kind of solution will reduce the time and human resources needed to build a software solution and this will ease the application of a Front-to-back development process by making software development teams more fast and agile. I think that this is the future of software development which will be more focused on frontend development while backend code will be auto-generated by this AI-driven Backend Engineer.
