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Software Development Can’t Be Automated — It’s a Creative Process With an Unknown End Goal

Ben "The Hosk" Hosking
Better Programming
Published in
3 min readAug 14, 2021

Photo by Júnior Ferreira on Unsplash

As much as people would like to automate software development, they can’t because it’s a creative and collaborative process.

It’s uncommon to think of developers as creative individuals but more technical people writing code. The common belief is developers take rules and automate them.

Developers can only create software to do what you tell it. Working out what the software should do and how it should do it is the creative process of creating software.

You can’t automate creativity and where the final software is unknown.

Why Can’t You Automate Software Development?

Most companies are complex. They work at an individual role level and as a whole. Companies comprise different roles, each role has

  • Specific tasks and activities
  • Captures different data
  • Can see or not see certain data
  • Security — What can and can’t specific users do
  • Different goals
  • Individual responsibilities

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Ben "The Hosk" Hosking
Ben "The Hosk" Hosking

Written by Ben "The Hosk" Hosking

Technology philosopher | Software dev → Solution architect | Avid reader | Life long learner

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You release this article *now*? A few weeks after GitHub releases co-pilot? And you really think it's an unsolvable problem?
Good luck. I'll be taking the ML/AI classes in the meantime to make sure I'm still employable when the majority of software becomes automated.