There's a lot of talk these days about AI tools replacing developers. Headlings about autonomous AI engineers like Devin, memos about "AI-first" development, and brash declarations of the 100X developer.
But I think a lot of this conversation misses an important point.
It's not about being replaced. It's about how you work - and whether you can adapt your problem-solving skills to this new era.
In my experience, the developers who stand out aren't just the ones who have logged the most hours. It's the ones who have mastered two things:
- their tools
- their approach to solving problems
The best engineers don't just code faster. They think differently. They hack with purpose. They ask better questions. They design better strategies. They fly through problems because they're constantly adjusting, learning, optmizing how they work.
And now, that same mindset is being applied to AI tools - tools that allow allready high-leverage developers to go even father and faster than anyone else.
The Excavator Effect
There's another, second-order change that I think many people are missing: the best developers will rapidly identify work that has become trivial - and they'll flee from it.
Imagine you're given an excavator. You don't keep looking for shovel sized problems. You look for bigger problems the excavator can solve.
In the same way, AI is making entire categories of work that used to be hard (building a decent website, basic apps, standard APIs) effectively trival at scale. Not necessarily easier to learn from scratch, but trivial to solve once you know hwo to wield the new tools.
As a result:
- The quality opf apps, sites, and basic products will explode
- The cost of building them will crash
- But their individual value may fall too - in a sea of "good enough" products, differentiation gets harder.
- Meanwhile, new modes of consumption may emerge that make today's interfaces feel obsolute altogether.
Chase the Right Problems
Here's where the real dangesr lies: not being replaced by AI, but by failing to chase the right problems.
This has always been true in tech.
- Mainframes gave way to desktops
- Desktop apps gave way to the internet
- The desktop internet gave way to mobile
- Now, status quo is giving way to AI...