Skills for the future software profession: beyond agentic AI!
For software engineering educators and practitioners, this paper provides qualitative insights into skill shifts, but it is incremental and anecdotal.
The paper identifies core skills needed by future software engineers in the age of agentic AI, based on round-tables with researchers and practitioners in 2026. Key finding: verification and validation become more important as agents handle implementation.
As coding agents are rapidly changing software engineering, a natural question is: what are the core skills needed by future software engineers? To identify where software engineering is headed and thus what skills will be needed, we summarize the results of two round-tables with researchers and industrial practitioners, held in 2026 in New York and Singapore. One key finding is that verification and validation is increasing in importance as agents handle implementation, as highlighted by anecdotes from the events. From our observations, we identify the skills developers need in the agentic era of development, with implications for training and educating future software engineers in coming years.