You see it everywhere you turn:
"I built this using just AI and im making 10K USD MRR"
"Just got funded 1 million dollars at 100 million USD valuation for my app i built with AI"
Well, I see it too... Initially, I was always thinking.
Damn! We(Devs) are so cooked š¬,
And more importantlyā¦ what about the next generation of devs?
Are they even going to want to enter this field anymore?
Questions that cast shadows of doubt about "Developers/Programmers relevance" would pop up.
Then something changed....
AI Bug Fixing in Freelancing
I went to fiverr and saw a trend... AI services were hot there.
But the ones that piqued my interest was:
AI-bug fixing, deployment and mvps
You see, AI still had to use the current architectures and systems that were already created.
But the average vibe-coding CEO didn't understand what the hell CI/CD was, or why their feature won't work on Safari, or how to stop bottleneck issues, or why GCP is returning an error.
Lovable, Bolt, Replit etc Their AI would always give them hopes even though its wrong or making things worse.
The fault isn't totally on the AI though. The startup founders who want to make their own 10K/month revenue app don't know how to best guide the AI. Garbage in, garbage out... except the garbage looks really confident and ships fast.
For simple-to-medium stuff? It works.
Missing semicolon, broken API call, quick UI tweak, adding automation flows... AI nails those
But here's what's also real:
Most of those AI-built service eventually ends up in front of a human developer.
Every single one of those AI codebases hits a wall. And when it does, someone posts on Reddit:
"Looking for a senior dev to untangle this mess. Will pay well."
The irony is beautiful. AI is generating a new category of freelance work: cleaning up after itself.
š„ Why People Still Need You
Here's the pattern repeating across the freelance market right now:
- Founder uses AI to build MVP
- MVP grows, gets complex, accumulates technical debt
- AI starts hallucinating fixes that break other things
- Founder is confused, frustrated, and losing money
- Founder hires a developer šāāļø And that's not the only thing keeping developers essential:
Context is everything...
AI doesn't know your client's 8-year-old legacy codebase.
or
It doesn't know that the "bug" in the payment module is actually an intentional workaround nobody documented properly. š
Also, the stakes get real fast too...
Bug in production. Money bleeding. CEO panicking.
Nobody's waiting on a prompt chain. They're calling a developer or someone technical ASAP!
Debugging a function is one thing.
Designing the system, making tradeoffs, scaling itā¦ thatās experience, which is highly relevant.
ā ļø The Bubble We May See
Now here's the part that genuinely worries me... and I don't see enough people connecting these dots.
The job shortage isn't just hurting developers today. It's quietly killing the next generation of developers before they even start.
Here's the thing...
Junior devs have always learned by getting hired. Working under seniors. Making mistakes in low stakes environments. Getting roasted in code review until they got good.
That pipeline is breaking.
Companies are cutting junior roles first.
Why hire a junior when AI can handle the boilerplate?
From a business perspectiveā¦ it makes total sense.
But think about it for a second:
If no one hires juniorsā¦
where do seniors come from?
The people entering the industry now are learning in a vacuum. Or not entering at all. Bootcamp enrollment is down. Too much reliance on AI without understanding concepts very well. CS grads are pivoting out. The message young people are getting is clear...
so they think: "There are no jobs, so why bother? š¤·"
Advice: Please bother. Give it a shot... me and my peers won't be here forever. You are the future.
š± So Where Does This Leave You?
If you're a developer right now: employed, freelancing, or searching. Here's the real talk:
Short term: It's rough. Adapt your positioning. There's still space here... for specialists, for generalists, for everyone in between.
That PostgREST bottleneck issue you fixed that one time? Someone today is tearing their hair out over the exact same thing.
No knowledge is lost š.
Medium term: Demand is growing for developers who understand AI-generated code. Who can audit it, extend it, deploy it properly. That's a real thing now.
Long term: Niche down. Get so deep on your concepts that you're not just using AI... you're directing it. The developers who understand the fundamentals well enough to drive AI-aided development? They're going to produce results nobody else can replicate.
And if the pipeline breaks the way I think it is... those developers won't just be valuable. They'll be rare.
The startup founder still needs someone to help when the app has been down since yesterday evening, users are churning, and the AI says it's done while the feature is still not working.
So guys... Stay in the game.
The future isnāt fewer developers. Itās fewer average ones...šš
You can also check out my fiverr gig on AI app fixing and development.
Top comments (13)
Yeah anything remotely complex will still need dedicated devs to properly guide it - I don't believe in a completely non-technical business guy or CEO or whatever in building anything sophisticated which actually WORKS (and performs, and is secure) ...
That's why I'm also not that concerned about the prospect for us 'devs' ...
But, if people (non-devs) are able to vibe-code a not too complex app using AI, without spending a fortune - I say power to them!
the token spend is getting crazier nowadays though.
They may have to spend that fortune
Honest take from someone paid to fix things: cleaning up AI-built apps niche is real, but half the time the right answer isn't repair. It's telling the founder their app shouldn't exist in that form and rebuilding the approach from scratch. Knowing when to stop patching is the actual skill, and AI makes that decision harder to make, not easier.
This is so real... sometimes you have to suggest a change that makes you rebuild everything from the ground up .
Founders atimes don't like this.
e.g "using redis as your main database"... So many funny cases like that
I don't think this is a long-term niche. The AI is getting better and better at building apps.
Totally felt this.
AI can get an MVP surprisingly far, but once the app has real users, real edge cases, and real money flowing through it, the gap between āit worksā and āitās reliableā becomes very obvious.
The part about juniors worries me too. If entry-level work disappears, the whole pipeline gets weaker later.
Good post. It frames the situation in a much more realistic way than the usual ādevelopers are finishedā takes.
Non technical people are more exposed to programming now even though they don't really understand it well.
A lot of which chase the illusion of making so much money from a site built with one prompt.
So this is bound to happen.
Programmers are still revelvant.
This is true. I keep telling other developers as well to keep learning the fundamentals and learn deep. AI is not going to code itself, if it does, it's going to take more than 100% of Earth's energy and resources to compute ambiguous tasks.
In this day and age, AI will become the reaper of weak developers and an angel for strong and consistent developers. The bubble is close to bursting based from the numbers. When that time comes, make sure you are that strong and consistent engineer.
instead of using "..." to denote my pauses, i think i could do better with em dashes.
how do you type em dashes with your keyboard?
Maybe ask ai ?
I've been in the job market for around 6 months and I've been coding for over 20 years. I can't describe just how frustrating it is to be asked "do you have experience with AI?" Well, I apparently have enough experience to know I should be asking you the same.
I feel like those who don't know better don't want to. They prefer the comfortable lie to the uncomfortable truth. There have to be some of those non-technical folks who really, actually just don't know better. It feels like the decision-makers don't know what they're even looking for. Something fancy or shiny sounding?
I'm more than willing to give this "all-in on AI coding" a shot. I'm always looking to expand my perspective and problem solving toolset. I've just spent too much time disillusioned to the AI craze to cheer with everyone else.
Really. Im sick of developers. How much time do you really think is going to take the AI with XXXXX agents doing and iterating and reviewing XXXXX amount of times until is code perfect? Do you really think that special and unique? Its sickening to listen to a guy that has spent the las 20 years in a cave without looking at the sun talking about taste.
the gap between prototyping with AI and shipping production code is still huge. AI handles the first 70% fast - it is the last 30% where you need someone who can actually debug what the model got wrong.