Lately I keep catching myself circling back to a fairly provocative question: is AI already a better programmer than most of us?
A year or two ago, a question like that would have sounded like a tabloid headline or an overblown prediction from some futurist. Today, though, after spending hours in my IDE with AI assistants sitting right next to me, I watch entire blocks of code appear in seconds. And let's be honest — that code is often cleaner, better structured, has fewer syntax errors, and even more sensible variable names than what the average developer would produce after five hours of meetings, three coffees, and one half-understood business requirement.
But asking "Is AI better than most programmers?" is a bit like asking "Is a calculator better than an accountant?" The answer is nuanced, and depends entirely on what exactly we mean by "programmer," and which slice of the job we're actually measuring.
Where AI clearly outpaces us
If we reduce programming to just writing code — yes, AI has already won. And not by a little.
Speed and routine work
CRUD operations, integrations with familiar APIs, DevOps config files (Terraform, Helm charts, Kubernetes manifests), unit tests for standard cases — AI generates all of this in seconds. Often with better structure and less copy-paste sloppiness than when we do it ourselves at the end of a long workday.Breadth of knowledge
None of us can hold the nuances of five or six languages, dozens of frameworks, hundreds of libraries, and constantly shifting best practices in our heads at once. AI "knows" (or at least convincingly simulates knowing) all of it simultaneously. Switching from Python to Go, or recalling some specific Terraform flag — the assistant is simply faster.No fatigue, no emotional noise
AI doesn't have bad days. It's not rushing to make it to Friday happy hour. It doesn't get distracted by personal problems or team tension. The mistakes we all make from sheer tiredness barely exist for it.
If a software engineer sees their job mainly as "translating Jira tickets into working code," they genuinely have reason to worry. In that narrowly defined role, AI is already faster, cheaper, and more consistent.
What AI still doesn't get
This is where my own perspective comes in, as someone who's spent years in this industry. Writing code is maybe 20–30% of the real job. The other 70% is exactly where models still stumble badly — and probably will for a while longer.
1. Context and architectural vision
AI sees the world through prompts and tokens. It can generate a perfect function, or even an entire module, but it rarely understands how that piece fits into the whole architecture, the business logic, or legacy code written 6–8 years ago by three different engineers with different styles and priorities. It doesn't "feel" technical debt the way a person who's lived with it for months does.
2. Asking the right questions
Clients and business stakeholders almost never show up with a ready-made, well-formed algorithm. They show up with a problem — often vague, contradictory, or overly ambitious. The real craft of a good developer or DevOps engineer is untangling that chaos, asking the right clarifying questions, and proposing a solution that actually solves the problem, not just answers the original ask literally. AI still struggles to say, "Are you sure you need a microservices architecture here, instead of a well-structured monolith with clear boundaries?"
3. Accountability and judgment under pressure
When a server goes down at 3 a.m., when there's a security breach, or when production starts behaving strangely after a deploy, the responsibility stays with the human. AI can suggest hypotheses and even fixes, but it can't carry the consequences. The final call, the critical thinking, the willingness to say "we're halting the deploy, even though everyone's waiting" — that's still entirely on us.
My verdict: the role is changing
Is AI better than most programmers?
Yes — if we're comparing it to a developer who mostly copies from Stack Overflow, GitHub, and ChatGPT without digging into the business and system context.
No — if we're talking about engineers who understand why they're doing something, not just how to write it. The ones who can see the bigger picture, take ownership, and make hard calls under pressure.
In my view, AI isn't replacing software engineers. It's just raising the bar. Today, an average developer armed with a good AI assistant has the output of a small team from five years ago. That inevitably shifts the focus away from raw syntax and routine coding, toward architecture, security, infrastructure, observability, and solving real business problems.
At the end of the day, AI is the most powerful tool we've ever had. Instead of wondering whether it will replace us, it's far more useful to learn how to conduct it — so that together we build better, safer, and more meaningful software. Because in the end, it's not the code that lasts. What lasts is the value we create for people.
Is AI already a better programmer than most developers? My thoughts on where it wins, and what still makes engineers irreplaceable: https://linuxdev.fedia.eu/blog/programming-and-artificial-intelligence/
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