If you’re new to the dev industry, welcome, you’re probably excited about AI. If you’ve been around as long as I have, the joy of solving problems is dying.
I think the rush to say software development jobs are dead is premature. It’s not dead, at least not yet. You still need someone with knowledge of how things work to guide the robots and validate the outputs. If you’re developing a product using AI and code without knowledge of code, there is an eventuality, a tipping point, when both you and the robot lack what is necessary to drive it beyond some critical mass. That’s when years of losses and hard won engineering experience come into play. Which brings me to my first gripe.
What used to be the dopamine rush of going head down solving a difficult problem, failing, trying, learning, and ultimately succeeding and coming out the other side with scars and knowledge, is now distilled into prompting AI and managing agents. I thought maybe coding with AI would feel more like buddy programming, instead the models have become so good at coding I spend most of my time prompting and reviewing code. The experience curve between a junior and a senior engineer is being flattened and software engineering feels a lot more like project management.
The real problem for me is I can’t ignore AI because not using the robots puts me at a disadvantage. I lose efficiencies and speed compared to my peers. Refactoring projects that would have taken me weeks is now a matter of a prompt or two. There’s no sense of reward or challenge. The dopamine rush is gone. Now, I get more joy from folding my laundry and seeing my t-shirts neatly stacked in my closet. I feel more accomplished patching drywall and watching paint dry.
The driving factor might be the cost of robot tokens vs human tokens because sometimes having access to infinite capital doesn’t solve a problem. Today, you still need people with knowledge (albeit fewer) and if you want to deliver a quality product you need a good team. It’s not game over yet, but it is plausible that day may arrive.