The Twilight of Offshore Development, and a Slightly Strange Feeling

Remembering the Offshore Development Era

While working these days by having AI write code for me, I suddenly remembered something from the past.

It must have been almost 20 years ago.

Back then, I was working as a bridge engineer in offshore development.

Younger people today may not really feel this, but at the time, it was fashionable in the IT industry to “send development overseas.” Japanese engineers were expensive. So if development was done overseas, costs would go down. That was the logic.

I stood between the Japanese side and the overseas development team, explaining specifications and reviewing deliverables.

There was something I often told the members at the time.

“Do not assume the code written by offshore engineers was written by humans. Treat it as code made by a robot, and doubt everything.”

If I said that today, it would probably become a serious problem. But at the time, I genuinely thought that way.

Of course, I was not looking down on them.

It was simply that when communicating specifications to people from different cultures and languages, we had to check everything on the assumption that nothing we considered obvious had actually been communicated.

We reviewed code thoroughly.

We wrote detailed specifications.

Because “they should understand without me saying this” did not work.

The Same Work, With a Real Robot

And now.

I have AI write code every day.

Before I knew it, I was doing the same thing I did back then.

I review code written by AI, check where it differs from the specification, and inspect suspicious parts.

The only difference is that the other party is no longer an overseas engineer, but a real robot.

Back then, it was a metaphor.

Now, it is reality.

And what makes it difficult is that AI is sometimes more capable than the offshore development teams of that era.

It does not complain.

There is no time difference.

It works late at night.

It returns deliverables in seconds.

If I had said something like this 20 years ago, nobody would have believed me.

Why Offshore Development Has Become Harder

Thinking about it that way, offshore development as a model has entered a very difficult era.

In the past, there was a reason: it was cheap.

But now, Japanese wages are not as high as they once were, and AI can take over a large amount of implementation work.

When you factor in communication costs, the reason to deliberately send work overseas is not as strong as it used to be.

Precisely because AI can now write code, the value of people who can think about what to build, what to be careful about, and what lies behind a specification has increased.

In that context, there is less need to outsource implementation alone to a foreign country.

What Remains Is Human Understanding

In the end, what remains is probably understanding between humans.

The atmosphere that is not written in the specification.

A casual remark in a meeting.

A customer’s subtle facial expression.

The kind of experience that tells you, “This project is dangerous at this point.”

These things are still not easy to convey to AI.

Long ago, I used to say that offshore teams were “like robots.”

And now, I am working with an actual robot.

Life is quite interesting.

I never imagined that words I once used as a joke would someday become true.