AI is coming for developers... Like calculators came for math teachers

So here we are again.

The robots are coming. ChatGPT and Claude are going to replace software developers. Pack it up, folks... time to learn to weld or start a YouTube channel or whatever hustle TikTok bros are pushing this week.

Except... no. It’s not happening.

And if you think it is, congrats. You’ve officially outed yourself as someone who doesn’t know what the hell a software developer actually does.

AI is a tool. A very cool, sometimes spooky, occasionally impressive tool. But it’s not a developer. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t reason. It doesn’t understand why something works. It just makes autocomplete look sexy.

You want boilerplate? Great. You want a quick CRUD scaffold in Rails? Sure. You want a "hello world" in Rust for some reason? Knock yourself out. But try pointing it at a legacy monolith built by five contractors and a ghost who hate each other over the course of years, and ask it to clean things up without breaking production... and watch it hallucinate like it just licked a frog.

It’s great for writing docs. Especially when the original dev couldn’t be bothered and left a commit message like "fix." It’s also handy for explaining code that looks like it was summoned in a blood ritual sometime in 2011. Basically, it’s like a tireless intern who’s read every Stack Overflow post but still doesn’t know what your app actually does.

That’s not a replacement. That’s an assistant. Sometimes helpful, sometimes wildly wrong, but always confidently mediocre.

Saying AI is going to replace developers is like saying calculators replaced math teachers.

They didn’t.

What happened was the tedious crap got automated. The rote stuff. The "what’s 47 times 19" nonsense that was never really the point of math in the first place. Same thing here. AI is going to eat the low-effort, copy-paste, stackoverflow-on-autopilot garbage that bloats every codebase and makes you wonder how we ever shipped anything.

Good. Let it.

If the only thing you bring to the table is regurgitating boilerplate, then yeah... AI should replace you. Not because it’s brilliant, but because your job wasn’t.

But for the rest of us? The ones solving actual problems, dealing with edge cases, making decisions that actually require brain cells? We’re fine.

Actually, we’re better than fine. We’ve got a power tool that handles the boring stuff. We don’t have to handwrite the same damn controller for the tenth time or argue over syntax nits in Slack (or god forbid, teams). We can move faster, think more, and get to the real work.

AI isn’t replacing us. It’s surfacing the dead weight.

And maybe that’s what’s making people nervous.

Because AI’s not going to figure out product-market fit. It’s not going to talk your PM out of a terrible idea. It’s not going to clean up after three pivots and a junior dev with more ambition than judgment or skill. It’s not going to debug that one weird bug that only shows up on Tuesdays when the moon is in retrograde.

That’s still you. Still me. Still the people who’ve been in the trenches long enough to recognize the smell of a codebase that’s about to catch fire.

So no, I’m not worried.

I’m annoyed.

Because every time this "AI is coming for your job" narrative pops up, it tells me how little people understand about what we actually do.

AI is a calculator. We're still the teachers.

And if you can’t tell the difference... you probably weren’t doing the job in the first place.