If you think you're going to be replaced by AI, then you're definitely going to be replaced by AI.
Let me tell you why your fear of AI is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This isn't another bullshit think-piece about "AI coming for our jobs" or whatever the LinkedIn influencers are fear-mongering about this week. This is about something far more fundamental: your fucking mindset.
The minute you start believing AI is going to replace you, you've already lost the plot.
The Self-Replacement Cycle I'm Seeing Everywhere
I spent way too much time on tech forums last month watching people have full-blown existential crises after playing with ChatGPT for an hour. These are the same folks posting things like "programming is dead" and "we'll all be looking for new careers within two years" while accumulating thousands of doomer upvotes.
Know what these geniuses did next? They signed up for a $20/month ChatGPT subscription and started SECRETLY USING IT TO DO THEIR ENTIRE FUCKING JOBS.
Let that sink in. These people are so convinced AI will replace them that they're PAYING MONEY to make it happen faster. They're literally outsourcing their thinking to an AI, then copying and pasting the results while collecting a paycheck.
The irony is so thick you could build a fucking bridge out of it.
The Two Types of Developers in the AI Age
I'm seeing a clear split forming in our industry:
The "I'm Fucked" crowd: These people are convinced they're obsolete. They're paralyzed by fear, watching AI demos and thinking "well, time to learn plumbing." They treat AI like it's their replacement rather than a tool.
The "This Is Just Another Tool" crowd: These people see AI for what it is—powerful, but just another tool in their arsenal. They're figuring out how to leverage it to eliminate boring parts of their work while enhancing their unique human skills.
Guess which group is ACTUALLY at risk of being replaced?
Here's the uncomfortable truth: if you can be replaced by an AI prompt, you were already replaceable. You just didn't know it yet.
The Technical Reality Check Everyone Needs
Let's cut through the bullshit and talk about what AI can and can't actually do right now:
What AI Can Do:
- Write boilerplate code that follows clear patterns
- Debug simple issues when given enough context
- Generate content that sounds good but might be factually garbage
- Summarize information it's been trained on
- Make your shitty documentation slightly less shitty
What AI Can't Do:
- Understand the true business need behind a technical requirement
- Innovate genuinely novel solutions to complex problems
- Write reliable, production-ready code for complex systems without human oversight
- Have actual domain expertise (it just fakes it convincingly)
- Know what the fuck it's actually talking about half the time
The biggest misconception I see is people thinking AI "understands" code. It doesn't. It's predicting what code should look like based on patterns it's seen. It's a super-powered autocomplete, not a replacement for understanding.
The Self-Replacement Trap
Here's where it gets really fucked up. The people most afraid of AI are often the ones actively training it to replace them. How?
When you:
- Use AI to generate code you don't understand
- Take AI's word as gospel without verifying
- Let AI make key design decisions for you
- Stop exercising your own problem-solving muscles
...you're literally practicing being replaced. You're training yourself to be the middleman between the AI and the computer. And middlemen are the first to get cut out.
It's like paying a guy to dig your own grave and then being surprised when someone pushes you in.
How NOT to Be Replaced by AI
So if you don't want to be replaced, here's what you need to do:
1. Understand what you're building at a deeper level than the AI
ChatGPT can write a React component. But does it understand why that component exists in your business context? Does it know your users' actual needs? Can it make judgment calls about tradeoffs specific to your situation?
No, but YOU can. This is your edge. Double down on it.
2. Master the things AI sucks at
System design across multiple domains: AI can help with individual components but struggles with big-picture architecture that spans different technical and business domains.
Explaining technical concepts to non-technical people: AI can generate explanations, but they're often generic and miss the specific angle needed for YOUR stakeholders.
Critical thinking about implementation details: AI will happily generate code that looks plausible but will fall over in production in subtle ways.
Human collaboration and negotiation: AI can't sit in a room with competing stakeholders and help negotiate a technical approach that balances everyone's needs.
3. Make AI YOUR bitch, not the other way around
The devs who will thrive aren't the ones running from AI—they're the ones getting exponentially more productive with it.
Use AI to:
- Draft the boring parts of your code so you can focus on the interesting problems
- Explore different approaches quickly before committing to one
- Help you understand unfamiliar codebases or technologies
- Generate test cases you might not have thought of
But always, ALWAYS maintain final judgment and ownership. The moment you abdicate understanding, you're volunteering for replacement.
The Mediocre Middle Is Where the Danger Lies
Let's be brutally honest: there's a large segment of our industry that:
- Copies Stack Overflow without understanding the code
- Implements requirements without questioning them
- Has been getting by through pattern matching rather than deep understanding
These are the people who should be worried. Not because "AI is coming for their jobs," but because they've been doing replacement-level work all along. AI just makes it more obvious.
Think about it: if your entire contribution is implementing straightforward requirements in a predictable way, why wouldn't a company eventually cut you out?
The Counterintuitive Conclusion
Here's the mindfuck conclusion I've come to: the more afraid you are of AI replacing you, the more likely it is to happen.
Fear leads to:
- Paralysis instead of adaptation
- Resistance instead of leveraging
- Outsourcing your thinking instead of enhancing it
Being "AI-proof" isn't about competing with AI at what it does well. That's a losing battle. It's about excelling at what AI CAN'T do—the creativity, judgment, human connection, and deep understanding that makes us uniquely valuable.
So if you're reading this and thinking, "Fuck, AI is going to take my job"—then yeah, it probably will.
But if you're thinking, "How can I use this to solve problems in ways that weren't possible before?"—then you'll be the one building and directing these AI systems, not being replaced by them.
The choice, as always, is yours. But stop being a whiny little bitch about it either way.
Choose wisely.
This post was originally published on yash.link. If you enjoyed this rant, check out more of my unfiltered thoughts on programming, technology, and the occasional existential crisis about building CPUs in TypeScript's type system.
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