Will AI Replace Programmers? Notes From Someone Who Ships With It Every Day

Yan Fróes — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:10:38 +0000

Ep 1 of building in public on Yanz Dev.

I let AI write most of my code. Every day. Seven products, one person, no team.

So when the question comes up - and it comes up constantly - "will AI replace
programmers?", I'm not speculating from the sidelines. I'm answering from inside the
thing. And my honest answer is uncomfortable for both camps: AI already replaced part
of my job. Just not the part everyone thinks.

Where this take comes from

Quick context, because takes without context are just noise. I'm an indie dev. I have a
day job, and outside of it I build my own products: a life-management app that's live, a
tennis community platform running in production, a SaaS starter template, a social
publishing agent, and - because apparently I hate free time - a 2D MMORPG engine written
in Ruby.

All solo. All built with AI in the loop daily. I'm not selling an AI course, and I'm not
farming panic for clicks. This is just what changed at my desk, and what didn't.

What AI actually took from me

The typing. That's the part that's gone, and I don't miss it.

Boilerplate - migrations, CRUD, forms, test scaffolding - I haven't hand-written those in
a long time. First drafts of features: I describe what I want, the agent writes a first
pass, usually with tests attached. Reading a huge unfamiliar codebase used to cost an
afternoon; now "explain how auth flows through this app" is a question, not a project.

But the biggest change is one I rarely see mentioned: unfamiliar territory stopped
being scary. This past stretch I shipped WebRTC signaling and real-time game netcode -
a fixed-timestep tick loop, a binary WebSocket protocol. Technologies I had never touched
before. Pre-AI, each of those meant weeks of reading before the first line of code. Now I
explore alongside the AI, ask my dumb questions in private, and ship. Entire areas of
programming moved from "someday, maybe" to "this sprint."

If your mental model of programming is "a person typing code" - then yes, that person is
being replaced. By programmers using AI.

What it didn't touch

Here's the part that never makes the thumbnail.

Deciding what to build. The AI has infinite ideas and zero opinions. Every feature in
my products exists because I chose it, and half of the job is saying no. Nothing about
that got automated.

Architecture taste. A real example: every AI assistant, by default, wants to give my
apps Postgres, Redis, and a fleet of workers. I run everything on SQLite - cheaper,
simpler, and honestly plenty for my scale. The AI will happily write the code either way.
The call is mine, and I can only make it because I understand the trade-off. That
understanding is exactly the thing you can't outsource.

Review. Every diff still passes through my eyes before it merges. The AI is confident
when it's right and equally confident when it's wrong - the tone never wavers, which is
precisely why a human gate matters.

Accountability. When production breaks at 2am, the AI is not the one responsible. I
am. My users don't care who typed the bug.

The job changed shape

So no - I wasn't replaced. But my job title quietly changed meaning. I went from typist
to director, and directing turns out to have real tools:

A conventions file in every repo. The rules the AI must follow: patterns, naming, what's forbidden. Without it, every session reinvents the codebase.
Tests as the contract. I make the AI write tests first. A very fast worker needs an objective referee, and "the suite is green" beats "it looks right."
CI as the gate. Lint, security scan, full test run on every change - so speed doesn't decay into chaos.

Managing AI well feels like managing an extremely fast junior with infinite patience and
zero memory. If that sounds like a skill - it is. It might be the skill now.

The junior question

The uncomfortable honest bit: if your entire value was "I can write the code," that value
dropped. The market is telling the truth about that, even when it's rude.

But if your value is "I can decide, verify, and own the result," you're fine - and you're
rarer than ever. Which leads to the conclusion juniors don't want to hear and seniors
under-repeat: fundamentals matter more now, not less. You cannot verify what you
don't understand. You cannot direct work you couldn't have done slowly yourself. The
ladder changed. The destination didn't.

So, will AI replace programmers?

It already replaced the part of the job that was typing. It hasn't touched the part that
was judgment - and that part was always the actual job.

One person now ships like a small team. That's not a threat, that's the biggest leverage
increase our profession has ever had - if you're on the right side of the divide
between generating code and owning it.

This is Episode 1 of my build-in-public journey - I'm documenting how I build all seven
products, with AI, in the open: the wins, the bugs, the real process. Follow along on
X, Threads, or the
Yanz channel on YouTube.