AI isn't replacing developers. It's replacing the industry, and that's far worse.
The future of development isn't AI developers, it's no development at all.
I am not an AI doomer. While AI has created a higher hurdle for junior developers seeking employment, but it’s been a net good for software engineers productivity and capacity to build products.
However, while I disagree with people who think AI will replace all developers, I also disagree with people who think their concerns are overly dramatic.
I am seeing the effects AI is having on our industry, and it’s doing something far worse than taking our jobs.
When AI started making it’s way into every day use in software development, the talk we kept hearing from “thought leaders” and tech CEOs is that AI will be replacing software developers in a few years.
I took those words with a grain of salt, because the people telling us how revolutionary AI was going to be were the same people who stood to benefit from its adoption.
It also became clear to me that their “AI will replace developers” was less of a prediction and more of a destination for CEO’s. A world where they don’t need to pay people but still make ludicrous amounts of money.
For a time, it certainly did seem like they were getting their wish. As coding-specific tools started to become available, I saw a shift of developers being skeptical of AI, to leveraging it in daily use and integrating it into IDEs, to eventually seeing non developers build working apps as these GTPs became better over time.
But the rise of AI in software development coincided with a perfect storm that crashed the developer job market.
The industry was simultaneously suffering from tech giant over staffing, venture money drying up, a wave of newcomers who saw software as high salaries with easy lifestyles. When I saw standard dev jobs outside of San Francisco or NYC go for 250k-400k, it became obvious the bubble was about to burst.
Developers were hit with layoffs in a saturated market as capital dried up and AI was taking all the low hanging fruit.
It did for a time look like AI was doing what their creators set out to do, make programmers obsolete.
BUT THEN I NOTICED SOMETHING….
The AI evangelists were correct about AI making it easier to build things, what they were wrong about the impact it would have on the industry they helped create.
What I am noticing is people making products with ease that would have taken people, time and money to build only a few years ago.
AI didn’t make software engineering trivial, it made PRODUCT development trivial.
And that changes everything.
The tech industry isn’t made up for just software engineers.
There are teams of people who focus on the non tech side of tech companies, marketing, business development, product development, etc.
Ask any indie developer out there and they will tell you the hardest part of building products is not making software. The hard part is making stuff people actually want to use, let alone buy.
There was a high barrier to entry for any given app. It required a lot of effort, energy, time and resources from multiple disciplines to achieve product/market fit.
But what happens when it no longer takes any of that to make something? What happens to an industry when suddenly anyone can build anything without effort?
What happens is you eliminate need.
When effort becomes trivial, it loses value.
In other words, why pay for someone else’s app when you can just build it yourself?When everyone can build anything, there is no incentive for anyone to build anything.
And without demand for new products, the tech CEOs who dreamed of AI-powered automation are becoming victims of their own success.
That is the effect I am seeing unfold right now in the product development space. Making things will be easier than ever, making money will be harder than ever.
Am I certain this is the future we are destined for?
No. I am not certain, nor is it the future that I want.
But I fear it’s a future we are unknowingly creating while we focus on what AI can do for us, we’re not preparing for what AI can do TO us.
I am not a doomer, but I also don’t hold onto hope for now. I don’t have any reason to believe we are going come together as a community to prevent this disaster.
This is what I believe:
The people who will profit from AI are a few, and they won’t care about the damage it causes.
The software industry as we know it is changing, we can’t stop it, and it is TBD if it will change for the better or worse.
The economics of the software industry is ever more dependent on fewer and fewer stakeholders.
All that being said, there is still some meat on this bone, and hopefully I am wrong about our fate, but I recognize that web development golden age may be in our past.
While I am grateful this job has been generous to me, and all of us so far. I am actively telling junior developers it’s not a safe bet.
Like I said I am not an AI doomer, but I am also not a everything’s going to be fine crowd either. I am not seeing AI replace developers, but I do see it draining value from the industry.
I don’t have a solution, nor do I think we need to stop AI.
What we need is to actively discuss what it’s doing for us and to us. Give us time to adapt, and hopefully steer our industry in a direction where there is still value for all of us, and not just some of us.