If AI Can Build an App in an Hour, What Makes a Developer Valuable Now? 🤔

If AI Can Build an App in an Hour, What Makes a Developer Valuable Now? 🤔

A thought I've been having lately.

With AI tools, you can build a website, create an app, or turn an idea into a working prototype in just a few hours.

Things that once took days can now take much less time.

So here's something I'm curious about.

If almost anyone can build an app with AI, what actually makes a developer valuable now?

Is it still how well you write code?

Or is it something else?

Maybe it's knowing what to build in the first place. Understanding the problem, making the right technical decisions, debugging when things go wrong, or building something people actually want to use.

Because getting an app to work is one thing.

Making it reliable, useful, maintainable, and worth using is another.

I'm not saying coding skills don't matter anymore. But I do wonder how the definition of a good developer is changing as AI gets better.

I'd love to hear your thoughts:

• What skill makes a developer stand out in the age of AI?
• Would you hire someone who can build quickly with AI but doesn't understand the underlying code?
• What are you focusing on learning to stay valuable as a developer?

I don't think there's one right answer, and that's what makes this interesting.

Comments

[Elanat Framework]

In this regard, I believe that, in the future, only highly intelligent and gifted people with strong reasoning skills will remain as developers.

I think developers who are good at reasoning and understanding problems will still be very important to any organization.

AI can sometimes give very good answers to a problem, but a good answer is not always a good solution. Sometimes it also simply doesn't understand the situation correctly.

For example, while generating the shuffle logic for a "Memory Tiles" game, the AI suggested changing the shuffleCards method so that identical pairs would not end up next to each other.

If nobody had thought about this, the game could have been designed in a way where the player would never need to choose two adjacent cards!

This is a simple example, but it shows why I think human reasoning will still matter. The AI can write the code, but someone still needs to understand what the code is actually supposed to achieve.