Will AI Make Developers Disappear? BFM Business Debate

Key takeaways

1. Program / source. BFM Business, Tech & Co Business — "The Debate" segment, aired on 2026-05-05. Replay URL: https://www.bfmtv.com/economie/replay-emissions/01-business/video-ia-et-si-les-developpeurs-disparaissaient-05-05_VN-202605050967.html
2. Format. 17 minutes, Brightcove video (videoId 6394717802112), unnamed host, two guests.
3. Guests.
4. Rémi Jacquet. , CEO of Cast Software France. Founder in 2023 of a think tank that grew from a handful to "about a hundred CIOs" in two years, partnered with Cigref and Epita.
5. Didier Girard. , CTO and CEO of SFEIR (spelled out explicitly on air: "S-F-E-I-R"), a French IT services company (ESN) of about 1,000 people.
6. Transcription note. Whisper renders "Cigref" as "le CYF" (read Cigref — Club Informatique des Grandes Entreprises Françaises, an association of CIOs from large French corporations, founded in 1970). The context (a think tank of about a hundred French CIOs + consistency with the ecosystem) leaves no doubt.
7. Transcription note bis. Whisper renders "harness" (English) as "Arnest" ("Arnest Engineering-type solutions", "op-ed on Arnest Technologies", "an agent is an LLM plus Arnest"). Read harness / harness engineering — a term now commonly used to describe the wrapping, control, guardrail, and orchestration layer around an LLM. See the op-ed by Sylvain Duranton (BCG X) in Les Échos the same day, mentioned on air.
8. Girard's headline thesis (most quotable). "Writing code has become an anti-pattern. Today, artificial intelligence is capable of producing code that is overall of higher quality than most engineers — this must be accepted."
9. Jacquet's headline thesis (most quotable). "By using AI agents, the developer becomes a conductor, a manager of specialized agents, capable of carrying out a number of tasks that he delegates to his various agents — a kind of arbiter who oversees what his agents do."
10. Why the profession is not disappearing (Girard). "We will always need people who build information systems. That's a certainty. (…) We are going to delegate analytical capacity and reasoning capacity to AI, but the decision-making side will always remain on the human side."
11. Key figures/theses.
12. AI productivity: "2× / 3× / 5× / 10× more efficient than an engineer — it's true, it's reality" (Girard).
13. SFEIR: "We are 1,000, but we have a production capacity of 10,000." (Girard).
14. Production cycle: "14-day sprints → one-hour or half-day bolts" (Jacquet).
15. Pizza Team: "if we take this 8-10 person pizza team and multiply it by 10, we get to 80-100 people — that doesn't work" (Girard).
16. Skills: "lifespan of a skill: 10 years → 1 year" (Jacquet).
17. Cast/Cigref think tank: grew from "a few CIOs" in 2023 to "about a hundred CIOs" in 2026.
18. New roles identified.
19. Conductor / agent manager / arbiter. (Jacquet).
20. Software architect + Product Owner merged. communicating directly with the business and taking "full responsibility for part of the information system or an application" (Jacquet).
21. Product engineer. (Girard): "the person capable of creating value for a given use. Relevance will no longer be measured by the number of lines of code produced, but by the value created for a particular need."
22. Distinction maintained: "There will always be software engineers — the profession is not going to disappear. There are areas where human intelligence will always be relevant. But a new role is emerging, which we call the product engineer." (Girard).
23. Tasks delegated to agents. (Jacquet): "coding, design, QA, DevOps, control, compliance".
24. HR risks identified.
25. Developers "opposed to AI for ethical reasons" or "who don't trust it".
26. Developers who "loved writing code and won't appreciate the role of software architect / validator of generated code".
27. "There are people who won't necessarily have the level [required]."
28. Token as new KPI / fuel.
29. "The token becomes the fuel for building value." (Girard).
30. NVIDIA anecdote: "sometimes they no longer give them bonuses, they give them tokens" — anecdote reported by the host, described as "amusing" by Girard, who was not previously aware of it (to be verified independently).
31. Metaphor: "you can ask the question: in your team, you have someone who doesn't consume tokens. It's a bit like a taxi company owner whose driver doesn't consume gas — does he create value?".
32. Reverse guardrail: "If you deploy an AI agent to 1,000 developers and let them play with it, your token consumption can explode — you need to channel and limit AI to where it brings real value." (Jacquet).
33. Evolution of the discipline (Jacquet).
34. 2024. prompt engineering.
35. 2025. context engineering — "if you put too much into the AI, it gets lost, it degrades a bit — so here we bring it under control".
36. 2026. harness engineering — "controlling the way AI moves forward". Cast Software explicitly positions itself on this layer.
37. Convergence with Sylvain Duranton (BCG X). op-ed in Les Échos on 2026-05-05 (the same day as the broadcast). Quote reported: "an agent is an LLM plus harnesses". The host emphasized: "French technologies, by the way" — an explicit sovereignty-minded positioning (Cast being a French vendor).
38. Probabilistic vs deterministic AI. (Jacquet): "AI is a technology that performs probabilistic analysis and is fairly untamable. If you don't channel it, if you don't put guardrails in place, there is a risk. What we propose is an analysis technology that is not probabilistic but deterministic, which provides AI with a number of structured pieces of information to force it to use that information in its operating model."
39. Structural warning (Jacquet). "The more powerful AI tools become, the more developers and teams will let their guard down. The stronger AI becomes, the more risks there are."
40. Organizational transformation.
41. New working group within the Cast/Cigref think tank: a complete overhaul of the Software Development Lifecycle including "all the human and organizational challenges" (Jacquet).
42. Jacquet's provocative thesis: "If anything, it might be easier to create a new IT department that is already AI-agent-based than to have to transform an existing one."
43. Pivotal role of HR departments: "For me, when it comes to the success of AI adoption in organizations and IT departments, the role of HR is truly fundamental. New roles need to be reimagined." (Jacquet).
44. Job description: "If the job description is mainly based on skills, we have an issue — because things keep changing all the time." (Jacquet).
45. Recommendations for junior developers.
46. "No, no, absolutely not [no reason to worry]. On the contrary, there really are positions to be taken — as long as the person has understood that they must become a conductor, a kind of software engineer." (Jacquet).
47. "You need to develop the fundamentals of mastering software architecture — that's difficult for a young person to acquire." (Jacquet).
48. "Code is the score. You really need to have the symphony on the conductor side." (Girard).
49. "The act of producing code, ultimately, is no longer all that useful. You need to work on the systemic side and the overall understanding of the system." (Girard).
50. Schools follow-up. "It is also up to schools at some point to review their curricula — as we discussed with Epita, who takes part in the think tank — so that profiles and skills lead IT departments to want to hire the young people coming in." (Jacquet).
51. News mentioned. "we have Anthropic's tools arriving; SpaceX saying, hey, I'm going to buy Cursor" (host, in the opening). Reference to be verified — the SpaceX/Cursor rumor is cited as one example among others of the attractiveness of the coding agents segment.
52. Host's closing verbatim. "We say 'developer profession,' but there are so many sub-roles within it, and Didier knows this perfectly well. You see, we're rather enthusiastic here about this profession."
53. Listening link. "If you're interested, go to the Cast Software website, or Cigref's" — to join the think tank.