If you had told me some time ago that I could work as a developer without actually developing, I would probably have laughed and moved on.
But today, not only is this possible, it’s already happening.
And I’m living this in practice.
The context
I’m part of a squad in a bank here in Brazil that was chosen as a pilot to test a new way of working, using AI as the main driver of development, not just an assistant.
No more using AI just to ask questions or generate a snippet here and there.
The idea was bold,
What if AI did 100% of the technical work, and the developer became an orchestrator?
Spoiler, it works better than it sounds.
How I used AI before
My use of AI was pretty much what most devs do,
I asked something,
Got an answer,
Copied what made sense,
Adjusted it manually
In other words, AI was basically a boosted StackOverflow.
Useful? A lot.
Transformational? Not really.
The new model, AI as the executor
Everything changed when we started structuring how AI is used within the development flow.
Two concepts made all the difference,
📄 AGENTS.md
A file that works like a behavior manual for the AI inside the repository.
In it, we define things like,
How the project is structured,
Coding standards,
Conventions,
Important business rules,
How to run, test, and validate
It’s basically the AI’s onboarding document.
🧠 SKILLS
This is where the real power is.
Skills are specific capabilities we give the AI to execute complete tasks, like,
Creating endpoints,
Fixing bugs,
Refactoring code,
Writing tests,
Analyzing logs and identifying issues
Instead of asking,
How do I do this?
You start asking,
Solve this.
My role completely changed
Before, I used to code.
Now, I,
Define the problem,
Provide context to the AI,
Validate the results,
Adjust direction when needed
I’ve become something between,
Dev,
Product thinker,
AI orchestrator
And that changes everything.
The impact in practice
🚀 Insane speed
Things that used to take days now take hours.
No exaggeration.
The AI can,
Understand the project context,
Apply patterns correctly,
Implement complete solutions
And the best part, without that repetitive manual effort.
🧹 Goodbye manual work
You know those tasks that aren’t really development?
Like,
Filling out detailed PBIs,
Writing documentation manually,
Creating boilerplate,
Adjusting repetitive code
AI just absorbed all of that.
And for me, that was one of the biggest wins.
🐞 Smarter debugging
With well-defined context, via AGENTS.md and SKILLS, AI can,
Analyze errors,
Suggest fixes,
Apply fixes directly
It’s like having a senior developer available all the time, just faster.
It’s not perfect, yet
Of course, it’s not all perfect.
Some challenges I faced,
AI needs well-written context, otherwise it gets lost,
Sometimes it solves things, but not in the best way,
You need to know how to validate, you can’t blindly trust it
In other words,
You stop coding, but you need to understand the system much more deeply.
What surprised me the most
It wasn’t just the speed.
It was realizing that,
The bottleneck is no longer writing code.
Now the bottleneck is,
Clarity of the problem,
Quality of the context,
Ability to guide the AI
And that changes the profile of a developer.
The future, in my opinion
After living this, I have a strong opinion,
Developers who only code will lose space,
Developers who can think, structure, and guide AI will grow a lot
Code has become a means, not the end.
Conclusion
This experience inside my squad was a turning point.
I went from someone who used AI as support to someone who,
Works with AI as the main execution layer.
And honestly?
I don’t see this going back.
If you’re a developer, my recommendation is simple,
Stop asking how to do things,
Start asking AI to do things for you, with the right context
Because the game has already changed.
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