The enterprise is not ready for “the rise of the developer”

Asked what enterprises aren’t ready for as AI advances, Sean O’Dell of Dynatrace offers a prediction — and before doing so, admits it may get him in trouble.

As a Principal Product Marketing Manager at Dynatrace, the observability platform used by hundreds of Fortune 500 firms, O’Dell is privileged with oceans of data that help him identify trends more quickly and, yes, do a little fortune-telling when pressed.

When The New Stack spoke with O’Dell last week at Dynatrace Perform, the company’s annual conference in Las Vegas, he offered a vision of the near future that might rankle folks who are really, really happy with the status quo of software development.

See also: Beyond automation: Dynatrace unveils agentic AI that fixes problems on its own

So, what is the enterprise not prepared for when it comes to AI? In five words, it’s “the rise of the developer,” O’Dell says.

“And I know that sounds funny,” he explains, because the developer has, in the last two decades, become further removed from the front lines of code being pushed into production, as other operational layers have been added to workflows as businesses expanded, the stakes grew higher, and the industry at large ballooned.

“The developer is not just a professional developer anymore.”

But AI-assisted coding, and indeed vibe coding, have blurred the lines between writing code and pushing it into production, O’Dell says.

“Now the developer owns every bit, every piece, bit and part of the [software development lifecycle]. And [the developer is] in dev, test, production. And guess what? You, Mr. and Mrs. Developer, you have to be the ones to control this. You have to own it. You have to make sure it’s secure.”

And that is just one way the developer’s role is changing. Another is who can be a developer.

“The developer is not just a professional developer anymore,” O’Dell says, adding that the work of writing software code with the use of AI has become more about the art of creation and less about the traditional tools of software development.

And where software development experimentation is happening is also changing. “Experimentation is now happening in production. If you would have told me this 18 months ago, I would have looked at you and said, ‘We probably need to rethink this conversation,’” O’Dell says.

A year ago, O’Dell tells The New Stack that the dominant question about AI and the enterprise was, ‘What is upon us?’” Today, he says, the level of understanding is established, and AI experimentation can be done with confidence.

Listen to O’Dell unpack more ideas about the future of AI-driven software development, where that is happening, who is doing it, and more, in this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast.

Nick Lucchesi serves as the editor-in-chief of The New Stack, where he directs editorial strategy and oversees coverage of the technologies and professionals driving software development, deployment and management at scale. Before joining The New Stack, Lucchesi held the position…

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