The divination department of the analyst firm Gartner said the technology will play an increasingly larger role in engineering tasks.

The consultancy said that in the short term, AI tools will modestly increase productivity by supporting a developer’s existing work. This process is already underway, and any training will be for senior developers during this time frame.

Afterwards, AI agents will start to impact engineering. Allowing for the full automation of certain tasks, this evolutionary period for both the technology and the profession will see the emergence of “AI-native software engineering,” in which most code is AI-generated.

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.”

Walsh added that natural language prompt engineering and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) skills will become essential for software engineers at this point.

In the longer term, the industry will see a rise in AI engineering as the technology becomes more powerful. The consultancy suggested that organisations will need an increasing number of skilled developers to meet the demand for AI software as enterprise adoption rates continue rising.