Let's be honest, you can't scroll through your feed, listen to a podcast, or even make coffee without someone, somewhere, mentioning the impending AI apocalypse. It is usually framed as: "AI is coming for your job, your keyboard, and your favorite coffee mug." But isn't that incredibly ironic?
We are the software developers. We are literally the architects building the AI, writing the code, and then using that AI to build even more tools. Are we truly creating our own replacements, or are we just very efficiently automating the boring parts of our day? It feels a bit like a baker building a robot to knead the dough, only to worry the robot will eventually want to run the whole bakery. I've always wanted to weigh in on this discussion and share my perspective, but I was always hesitant because I am not an "AI expert" and didn't want to get ratioed by researchers. However, I read something truly interesting recently that gave me a new perspective, and I had to share it.
The Computer Era Paradigm
We have all heard the stories of how we moved from papers to digital, and how computers were coming into the picture and they will take the job of the workers who were writing them everything in the registers. The wave that we are experiencing right now is kind of similar to that wave. At that time, people who were doing everything on the papers would have felt terrified and didn't wanna lose to a computer. But as the computers were new, they were quite fast and were efficient in doing the jobs and storing each and everything in the memory to be kept for later use.
This tension is perfectly depicted in a movie I watched (Hidden Figures, if you're looking for it). Initially, teams of human "computers" did complex space research calculations and re-evaluated all the answers so the spacecraft wouldn't deviate from its path. Then, electronic computers were introduced, creating the same panic that we experience these days: "All these people doing calculations will be let off!" But the movie clearly shows how these workers didn't panic and quit. They learned how to use the computers and how to use them to their own advantage, get their jobs back, and become even more valuable.
This is exactly what is happening right now. When the AI bubble started getting bigger and people were introduced to thousands of models every single day, it didn't just stop. There were people who started using these models and started to create newer models that were fast, precise, and solved a specific problem so that tokens weren't wasted. (And because nobody has a token budget that large!
The AI Era Evolution
As in the computer Era, the computer became a household thing, and every kid in the neighborhood wanted to have a computer in their home and wanted to use and experiment with it. The reason that we have Microsoft today is the solely reason cause Bill Gates' school had a computer and he used it daily and learned each and everything about it and explore each and every component of it and later with his friends created Microsoft. This story tells us that if in this AI era we experiment and learned each and everything about AI we might be able to build a next Iron Man.(Or at least a much better CLI tool).
I don't feel that AI will take our jobs as we all are software developers, and we all are using AI in our day-to-day life and using and experimenting with it to create something for personal use or professional use. It has helped many developers to crack jobs, help with the interviews, build software that help people do things better. Anthropic hackathons are proof of how advanced we have moved forward with AI as people are using Claude to create the next Y Combinator startup.
It has led me to think who might lose the job if it concerns. I think the people who live under a rock might lose their job or a person who neglect AI and wanna showcase his or her skills and take 10 hours to create something that could be done with AI in one hour. (At some point, your team is going to wonder why you are writing raw boilerplate by hand when you could be focusing on system architecture).
Of course, the constant debate of creating something with AI and then debugging it for hours is a concern, but as software developers, debugging is the ultimate skill that any developer should know. If you know where the bug is and you have the ability to solve it, then you are a good developer. We all can't be AI proof, but we can always use AI to our advantages and use it as a leverage or tool to make our lives and our work better. To support this argument, Amazon initially laid off 30,000 people but re-hired 11,000 of them as AI turned out to be more expensive than expected. AI might be smart, but human logic is still cheaper per hour than a cluster of H100s.
AI as a Tool
Whenever I hear of losing a job to AI, I wasn't really concerned because I have always looked at AI as a tool to leverage us, not as a liability that will take us down. Of course, many people have lost their jobs, but I felt that this was a necessary step that was required. (And before you find me in the comments, let me explain!).
The reason being, when COVID hit and everything went online, companies started mass hiring people. The tests and the interviews were not that strict, which led to a lot of bloated teams. With AI coming in the picture and taking the jobs, I feel the people who have lost the job were initially the ones that weren't doing good in a company. Because if you are doing good in a company and you have the skillset to learn and adapt to each and everything that comes to you, you are future-proof.
Think about it: we all initially learned JavaScript, then learned Node.js, then moved to React. And then, if the company required them to learn Django and Flask, we learned it and added it to our skills. So if you are a developer, and you have the ability to adapt to each and every situation that you are thrown in, and you have the ability to come out of it as a winner, then there is nothing that you can't learn or get better at. If I consider myself from 2021 or 2022 when ChatGPT was the biggest name to be heard, I didn't consider myself using AI. But today I am using AI and I know prompting and I know how to generate content that could get better and better if I work on it. So yeah, AI has helped me in many ways possible that if I had waited looking for someone to help me, then I wouldn't have reached the level that I'm currently at.
My Concern
My concern with AI is that I don't get too dependent on it. I wanted to learn, I wanted to explore. I wanted to build projects using AI, but I should be the one having the core knowledge to build and explain the project from scratch. The more complex the project gets, the more we get dependent on AI to write code and refactor all the errors. (If you don't know how the foundation works, you are just one bad context-window hallucination away from a broken application).
Since day one of using AI, I have never felt that it can replace me. Of course, there are a lot of things that AI can do, but the key thing that requires AI to do its task is the prompt and ability to come up with an idea. If I don't have the idea or the knowledge to make it, I won't make it, as if I talk with AI about any project, it will definitely describe it as the best competitor for Google (while still struggling to horizontally center a simple div container).
At the end of the day, AI is an incredible spatula. It helps us flip the code faster, but it still doesn't know what the software is trying to solve for the human user. We are still the master chefs we just have sharper tools in our kitchen.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read through my thoughts and perspective. I would love to hear your experiences. How are you leveraging AI tools in your current workflow? Are you using it to supercharge your building speed, or are you fighting with hallucinated bugs in your dependencies? Let us know down in the comments below!
If you want to keep swapping prompt strategies, talk about software engineering trends, or share your build journey, feel free to connect with me over on LinkedIn. Let us keep collaborating, building in public, and growing together!
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