Is AI really changing the role of developers, or just changing how people see us?
AI is transforming the world, but when it comes to my day-to-day work, I doubt it’s changing as much as people claim.
As a developer, you design a product. Back in school I learned about collecting requirements. AI can help analyze text, summarize interviews, and transcribe recordings. But it cannot ask the questions. Because it only responds to what you tell it to do. AI will never think, at least not the versions we’re working with today.
Software developers design products functionally. We describe the functioning so precisely that even a dumb computer, which can only do calculations, understands what we intend it to do.
We’ve also learned to validate this description with our customers and stakeholders. And that validation, checking if our understanding is correct, is one of the hardest things we do. The people we talk to are not always clear in their requests. Not because they don’t know what they want, but because they don’t know what they don’t know. The response you often hear as a developer is: “you are doing magic.” But technically, we’re just doing logic.
Developers can understand complex problems and see relationships between different inputs. We can generalize, turn problems around, and look at them from new angles. Systems like LLMs, even when combined with agents, cannot do this. Because an LLM isn’t doing logic, it’s doing statistics.
So no, I don’t think our work is changing that much. We’re just being pushed back to what we were always meant to do, solving problems, not being code monkeys.
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