Look, I get it. I didn't want to write this post.
But I keep seeing the same comments. Here on Dev.to. In a community of people who actually work in tech, who try new tools, who should know better.
"AI will never replace developers."
"It's just autocomplete."
"You still need humans to think."
And I'm sitting here like... are we looking at the same thing?
I'm not some AI doomer
I want to be clear about that. I use these tools every day. They've made me faster. I'm genuinely excited about what's possible.
But I'm also watching the goalposts move every few months, and nobody seems to want to talk about where this is actually going.
Remember when it was "AI can't write code"? Then "okay it can write code but not good code." Then "fine, good code, but it can't understand complex systems."
Every time. Every single time someone draws a line, that line gets crossed. And then everyone just... draws a new line and pretends this time it's different.
It's not different. I wish it was.
Here's what bugs me
Dev.to is already a bubble. We're the people who actually follow this stuff. Who read the release notes. Who have opinions on Claude vs GPT.
If we are in denial, what about everyone else?
I talked to my cousin last month. Smart guy, works in insurance. He still thinks ChatGPT is "that thing that writes essays for students." He has no idea that AI is doing actuarial work now. His job. Right now.
The gap between what these systems can do and what regular people think they can do is massive. And it's getting wider.
The thing nobody wants to say out loud
There's no plan.
Like, actually none. No serious policy discussion about what happens when a significant chunk of white-collar work gets automated. No safety nets being built. Politicians are still yelling about stuff from ten years ago.
We're walking into one of the biggest economic shifts in modern history and most people won't notice until they're already getting laid off.
I don't say this to be dramatic. I say it because I've been in meetings where executives talk about "efficiency gains" and "doing more with less" and everyone knows what that actually means but nobody says it.
The cope is strong
I hear it everywhere:
"AI can't replace human creativity."
Maybe. But it doesn't need to be creative. It needs to be 80% as good and 10x cheaper. That's enough for most business decisions.
"Companies will always need human oversight."
Yeah. One person overseeing what used to be a team of twelve.
"New jobs will be created."
Some will. Not enough. And there's no rule that says the people who lose jobs will be the ones qualified for the new ones.
The industrial revolution eventually created more jobs than it destroyed. "Eventually" was decades of displacement and poverty. And that transition was slow.
This one isn't slow.
I'm not saying panic
I'm saying: look honestly at what you do every day.
How much is pattern matching? How much is taking information from one place and putting it somewhere else in a different format? How much is stuff that, if you're being real, could probably be automated in the next few years?
For most of us, it's a lot. More than we want to admit.
That doesn't mean you're doomed. It means you should probably be thinking about this instead of pretending it's not happening.
What I'm actually doing about it
Not advice. Just what I'm doing, for whatever that's worth.
I'm getting good at the tools. Not fighting them. If AI can do 60% of my grunt work, I want to be the person directing it, not the person it's replacing.
I'm trying to move up the stack. The more my work is about judgment, tradeoffs, understanding messy human context — the harder it is to automate. The more it's about cranking out code to spec, the easier.
I'm building relationships. When things get rough, opportunities come through people, not job boards. That's always been true but it's going to matter more.
And honestly? I'm saving money. Having a runway isn't paranoid anymore. It's just practical.
I don't know how this ends
I'm not going to pretend I have answers. The people who claim certainty in either direction — "everything will be fine" or "we're all doomed" — are both full of it.
What I know is that pretending this isn't happening doesn't help anyone. And the denial I see, even from smart people, even here, worries me more than the technology itself.
Maybe I'm wrong. I'd love to be wrong.
But I don't think I am.
Genuinely curious where you think this goes. Not the hot take, not the cope — what do you actually believe happens in the next five years?
Top comments (4)
I think there are a lot of problems that still need to be solved.
The economics don't make sense. The big AI companies want to make us addicted to AI so we spend our money on their product.
But when there are less people that have a job, there are less people that are going to afford their product.
People rather buy food and drinks, stay warm or cold, have drinking water, have a house. Than paying for a product where the only goal seems to be become more productive.
They are going for the free alternatives, and China is getting good a providing those alternatives.
People outside of the tech and entrepreneur world aren't that interested to use AI. So it will never see the numbers that social media networks get.
For most people it is the newest thing they are forced to use because companies push it down their throats. Like subscriptions for car features.
Sure there are going to be job shifts. Who thought blogger or youtuber or influencer would be sustainable jobs not so long ago.
On the subject of one man teams. that only works if you want to involve yourself in all the different jobs. The world has too many edge cases for machines to take over all responsibility.
It the short term it might work, but no one did it long term. That is one of the experiments we are going to get through, and I think it is not going to be pretty.
Another problem is that a lot of money is with a smaller amount of people. That is not going to last. More and more people are going to want a more equal spread. How long are people going to take that they can't afford a hamburger, but they see a few others eating a piece of meat that costs them thousands. Before people could hide that, but now everything is visible to everyone.
Social injustice is a powerful motivator.
We also seeing that AI doesn't make live cheaper but more expensive. In the USA people have to pay more for electricity. They experience more pollution. There water supply is drying up.
As a tech product AI is a revolution, but the big question is will it be good or bad?
I don't think anyone is going to predict the future, because there is a lot more at play than just AI.
I just saw youtube.com/watch?v=5Di6o6zuMLc. In that video they explained better what I was telling about the one man teams.
It is not even just the tech industry anymore; AI is coming for most sectors. I do think people will still have their jobs in the end, but there will probably be mass layoffs before we get there. It’s a huge shift for everyone.
I'm new here so haven't really been influenced by any group-think happening in this community. I'm a freelancer and I've been using Copilot since beta, try all the new tools, and even had a pro version of Devin for a time. I'm not doing any "head in the sand" assessments.
It sounds to me like you're conflating 2 things; "Can AI code good?" and "Is AI going to replace human developers en masse?". The goal post keeps getting moved on the former not the latter.
These things aren't really co-dependent after all. Code output was never the bottleneck.
That's not to say what you're predicting isn't going to happen. It might. But I am running the entire project in my head when I make decisions. And I'm running the social network of the company and stakeholders. And I'm pulling in the footguns I learned on other projects. And I'm predicting where things might go wrong and taking steps to alleviate that possibility. And I'm communicating these risk profiles and decisions to the other interested parties. And I'm putting the documentation in places I know the other humans (and now AI) will look.
So how much of what I do is just pattern recognition and moving things around? Surprisingly little tbh.