Over the next three years, many organizations will use AI agents to write the majority of their software, moving developers into review roles, Gartner predicts. But challenges and questions remain.

Developers unimpressed by the early returns of generative AI for coding take note: Software development is headed toward a new era, when most code will be written by AI agents and reviewed by experienced developers, Gartner predicts.

Organizations and vendors are already rolling out AI coding agents that enable developers to fully automate or offload many tasks, with more pilot programs and proofs-of-concept likely to be launched in 2025, says Philip Walsh, senior principal analyst in Gartner's software engineering practice.

By 2026, "there will start to be more productive, mainstream levels of adoption, where people have kind of figured out the strengths and weaknesses and the use cases where they can go more to an autonomous AI agent," he says. "In the 2027 range, we'll really see this paradigm take root, and engineers' workflows and skill sets will have to really evolve and adapt."