AI Didn’t Steal Our Jobs — It Just Gave Us More Code Reviews

Remember when everyone said AI was coming for our jobs? Yeah… turns out it just came for our patience.

Studies are now showing that experienced devs actually take longer to finish tasks when using AI tools. That’s right—“productivity” apparently means watching AI write your code fast, then spending the rest of the day fixing it.

AI-generated code is like that overconfident intern who proudly says, “Done!” before testing anything. It looks great until you realize it imports libraries that don’t exist, violates every naming convention you’ve ever agreed on, and treats security like an optional add-on.

We were promised freedom from repetitive work. Instead, we got a new kind of fatigue: prompt-wrangling, hallucination debugging, and reviewing code that looks like it was written by five different people who never met. Developers didn’t get replaced—we got promoted to robot babysitters. Congratulations, the future is here, and it still needs your approval before merging to main.

But AI isn’t the problem. The way we use it is. Most teams just plug it in and hope it’ll write perfect code. Spoiler: it won’t. You need structure.

Here’s how to do it right:

1. Make your IDE smarter, not just fancier. Use repo-aware assistants that actually understand your codebase. Context isn’t optional—it’s the difference between usable code and a mess.
2. Automate your checks. Linting, dependency scans, tests, and CI/CD gates shouldn’t rely on human memory. Let automation catch the stupid stuff so you can focus on the hard stuff.
3. Give AI guardrails. Define your frameworks, deployment patterns, and coding standards. Let it generate within those lanes so you don’t spend your day cleaning up its creative freedom.
4. Shift-left on security. Don’t trust AI to handle secrets, compliance, or safety on its own. Scan early, scan often, scan everything.
5. Keep human review sacred. The final “LGTM” should still come from a real dev who understands both the problem and the business. AI doesn’t know your customer—it barely knows your repo.

When you get that right, coding with AI actually feels good. You hit that flow where your tools help instead of hinder. Some call it “vibe coding.” I call it finally making AI earn its keep.

So no, AI didn’t steal our jobs. It just gave us more code reviews—and maybe a reminder that great engineering isn’t about who writes the code. It’s about who makes sure it’s worth keeping.