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AI is poised to dramatically change the way software engineers work
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Today, their focus is primarily on code
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Wayfair's cloud guru said with AI helping write code, software engineers in the future will be free to think more about features and the user experience.
By now everyone has heard the claim that AI will change the world. But what kind of day-to-day impact might it really have on, say, software engineers? We sat down with Wayfair to find out.
The subject is something Matt Ferrari, Wayfair’s head of martech, data, and machine learning in its Engineering and Product division, is passionate about. Generative AI, he said, is poised to “radically change” the way software engineers work.
“An opportunity in the generative AI space in the immediate [term] is for generative AI to help develop release notes, documentation and coding notes on what does this code actually do, what are all of the ancillary places where this code is used,” he explained. “The reason why that is important is so that not only can a developer go faster because now they know what all of the code actually does…but it also allows them to really focus on the ‘why.’”
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He added that today, much of a software developer’s time is focused on solving for the ‘what’: what needs to be on the page, in what size and in what color. But with that code taken care of, they can start to think differently and turn their attention more toward value-added features and customer experience.
Wait, wait, you say, Wayfair? Isn’t that a retail company? Yes and yes, but it’s a retail company that’s in the midst of revamping its more than 6,000 applications to run natively in the cloud. Its team just completed a lift and shift of all its applications to the cloud (primarily Google Cloud) and has already refactored nearly half of those, so they know a thing or two about cloud and software engineering.
That’s especially true of Ferrari, who prior to his time at Wayfair spent nearly 20 years as a CTO, first at Hosting and then at ClearDATA. He also spent two years serving as a mentor for Techstars.
Ferrari said today, around 70% to 80% of engineering velocity is spent on tech transformation efforts. But as apps are modernized with the help of GenAI, that script (pun absolutely intended) will flip.
In the future, instead of focusing on something like refactoring an app or managing a database, the vast majority of engineering mindshare will be focused squarely on developing use cases around customer care, lowering prices or improving shipping. And the impact of that change is “potentially enormous” for both enterprises and customers alike, said Ferrari.
“Being able to flip that script potentially unlocks both a financial opportunity for Wayfair, but also a pricing opportunity for customers as we can make the experience better and cheaper,” he said.
Ferrari had a lot more to say about the cloud, including how Wayfair got started, why it chose Google Cloud as its primary provider and what he would do differently looking back on its migration journey. But that’s a story for another time. Stay tuned for more of my conversation with Ferrari later this month.