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Johan Maes
Johan Maes

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Hey Hey, AI (Into the Black?)

Is there more to the picture than meets the eye? How AI has affected my life as a backend developer.

As developers, we've always used — and often enjoyed — productivity-boosting tools. I still remember the excitement back in my .NET days when we finally convinced our boss to buy us a ReSharper license. Bless its squiggly line suggestions, refactoring features, and enhanced code completion! Then along came AI, offering code completion on steroids and a seemingly infinite knowledge base. No other tool has impacted my work as a developer quite like this one.

I joined the party a little late. In early 2023, I was mentoring an intern who used ChatGPT for almost everything — right down to drafting emails to me in an excessively formal tone and crashing the application he was working on with AI-generated code he didn’t fully understand. Behold the dangers of AI! But he also introduced our team to this new tool. It wasn’t nearly as good as it is now, but it could already do some pretty impressive things. Clearly, it was time for us to start experimenting with it in our daily work.

Since then, I've been using AI for solving well-defined, small tasks — whether it's adding a new function, tweaking a few lines, or debugging an issue. Most importantly, it’s become my go-to for asking all those “stupid” questions I might hesitate to ask a colleague. It’s like having a senior developer at my constant disposal — without the intimidation or embarrassment that can come with talking to a real person.

Do we need to learn new skills to get good results? Yes and no. You need to know when to stop iterating on a problem and turn to good old Stack Overflow or a classic search — or when not to start at all. Giving clear instructions is also a skill that takes practice. The good news? There’s always room for correction (unless you’re out of quota). What hasn’t changed is the need for a critical eye when using AI-generated code — thoroughly reviewing and understanding it. Fortunately, I enjoy this part of being a developer. Skepticism comes naturally to me, and I had already honed this skill long before AI entered the picture.

Once you learn to navigate it, AI makes it much easier to dive into a new project or pick up a new language. It doesn’t just boost my productivity — it also improves the overall quality of my work, something that’s often overlooked. After all, you’re tapping into the collective knowledge of thousands of developers — how could that not lead to better code?

Am I worried that AI could take my job or change it beyond recognition? Of course — and we all should be. As developers, we like to think we’re special, but why would we be any different from other professions where AI has been introduced to support or even replace humans? Optimization is happening everywhere.

I like to think AI will reduce the need for so-called "experts". As Paul Ford puts it in the excellent Reqless podcast:

... so there is a pleasure in replacing consultants that maybe there isn't in replacing other kinds of roles.

Who hasn’t had an external consultant parachute into a project, do little more than write a report repeating what you've been saying for the past five years — while getting paid five times more?

However, with the rise of AI, a new breed of consultants is emerging: the AI/low-code consultant. As we speak, low-code solutions are being force-fed to developer teams far and wide. I’m not saying these tools have no value — the real issue is using them in the right context and for the right reasons. Not just to cut developer headcount or because a big tech firm wooed you with a free team-building day and catered lunch.

Of course, many developers are hesitant to embrace AI-driven platforms for building applications. Developers have feelings too: we don’t want to become drag-and-drop monkeys, we want to touch and feel the code. In my view, bridging the gap between developers and business expectations remains one of the biggest challenges in our industry. Nothing new there.

To complete my Neil Young analogy: while AI has (sort of) come out of the blue, it remains to be seen — hence the question mark in the title — whether it will go into the black or into the red. Meanwhile, developer rock and roll can never die, but it will definitely change (and already has). Let’s just hope we don’t skip the classic rock era and dive straight into the abyss of reggaeton and the like.

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juanbovo

Completely agree! Thanks for this article, Johan!