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Developers vs AI: Are We Becoming AI Managers Instead of Coders?

Marxon on November 30, 2025

AI is no longer a shiny add-on in our workflow, it’s the silent co-worker sitting next to us every day. The one who writes our boilerplate, explain...
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frendhisaido profile image
Frendhi

I agree. For more than a decade of coding, the most challenging work I have been facing every day was always between translating business problems to system design and learning the framework/library APIs or documentations. I started vibe coding last year and I can’t remember the last time I buried myself in any documentation for hours just to make the thing work. But I still have to try to understand the business requirements, contexts, nuances, urgencies, etc., just to come up with the right solution to the right problem. AI can’t do that (yet).

So, yeah, I agree, we are going to be AI supervisors. The young ones should pay attention to this! They should really start to read a lot, write a lot, and test their ideas a lot.. otherwise, their “context windows” won’t be as large as someone who does read, write, and test a lot.

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marxon profile image
Marxon

Absolutely, you nailed it.
AI can remove the friction of digging through docs, but it can’t replace the real work: understanding business context, making trade-offs, and choosing the right solution for the right problem.

And yeah, younger devs really need to hear this. If they don’t build their own “context window” by reading, writing, and experimenting, AI won’t amplify their skills, it’ll limit them.

Thanks for the great insight!

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Kelly Thomas

Great perspective. AI isn’t replacing developers — it’s changing the role. We now focus more on architecture, problem-solving, and guiding AI output instead of writing every line manually.

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drodriguez1865 profile image
drodriguez1865

Great series! I look forward to the holiday specials! I’ve been using Claude Code way too much due to the ease of the AI suggesting solutions but you hit the nail on the head with series. With time, if developers don’t learn how to properly use AI and rely on just blindly accepting its solutions, we lose our edge and in turn lose our identity as a developers/engineers. I am certainly guilty of accepting what AI offers, no questions asked, but this series definitely opened my eyes to review how a use AI in my workflow.

Also, I wonder if you would write an opinion piece about the industry in general and the effect AI had on it. AI is often compared to a junior developer so what does that mean for the role of junior developers going forward?

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mythorian_b77f3ebd0bce9c7 profile image
Mythorian

i was really crashing down. lately i have been using ai more and more and when i look at how clean and standardized the code is and then i feel traumatized. cause i could write the same code but a hell lot more different way. i understand the code but if i had to write all of it i doubt i would do the same things. this post kinda help me feel better. tnx mate

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marxon profile image
Marxon

Hey, I totally get what you mean — a lot of us are going through the same thing.

AI-generated code looks so clean and standardized that it’s easy to forget one thing:
clean ≠ creative, and standardized ≠ better.

If you understand the logic behind the solution, you’re already doing the real, hard part of being a developer.
AI is just very good at producing the most “probable” version of something, not the most thoughtful or personal one.

Most of the time, if you had written the code yourself, it would have worked just as well. Maybe it would look different, but that’s because you bring experience, style, and reasoning that AI doesn’t have.

So don’t beat yourself up.
AI didn’t replace your skills, it just changed what “normal” looks like in terms of output formatting. The thinking part, the problem-solving part, the developer part is still 100% you.

Really glad the post helped a bit.
You’re definitely not alone in this. 🙌

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ingosteinke profile image
Ingo Steinke, web developer

No, coding with AI feels like onboarding a junior dev that never learns.

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ingosteinke profile image
Ingo Steinke, web developer
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leob profile image
leob • Edited

But that's why reviewing is now "becoming" so important (I put "becoming" between quotes because it WAS already important, of course) - your AI-generated code can be wrong, but so can human-written code ...

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ldrscke profile image
Christian Ledermann

There are some tricks to facilitate the onboarding:

  • Make documentation and contributor guidelines a first class subject matter, this helps AI as much as it helps humans.
  • Let the AI reflect at the end of the session in a retrospective and let it update the documentation accordingly.

This will create a kind of "long term memory"

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leob profile image
leob

It can certainly learn - good AI models/tools like Claude can ingest your code base and acquire deep knowledge of it, and then make intelligent (or seemingly so) suggestions ...

I've seen that work for real with Cursor on a large codebase, and I was pretty much blown away with the things it came up with ...

Of course it can make mistakes, but so can that junior (or even senior) dev :-)

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Team Awesome • Edited

Reading this, I realized I kind of ran the experiment already. I built toolpod.dev largely by feeding specs and tweaks into AI tools, letting them spit out components, then stepping in as the human who says “this stays, this goes.” It got the platform up way faster than if I had written everything by hand, but it still needed me to set constraints, clean up weird edge cases, and decide what was actually shippable. That feels less like turning into a pure “AI manager” and more like pair programming with a very fast junior dev who never sleeps and will happily create terrible UX if you are not watching. The trick seems to be using AI for acceleration while keeping humans in charge of architecture, taste, and where the product is actually going.

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Lucas Lamounier

Excelente ponto sobre arquitetura ser mais importante que nunca. Realmente notei isso na prática - quem entende os trade-offs do negócio e consegue comunicar bem com a IA aproveita muito melhor as ferramentas.

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Willie Harris

If coding turns into managing AI, the real skill won’t be writing code — it’ll be knowing how (and when) to let machine-generated code take the wheel.

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ldrscke profile image
Christian Ledermann

I have similar experiences with my experiment in spec driven development.

Focus shifts more on the architecture and requirements than the implementation