Could This Be My Last Job as a Software Developer?

I have been a software developer for years. Lately, AI writes almost all my code.

And I'm starting to wonder what being a senior developer even means anymore.

Programming used to feel a little like solving a Sudoku. There was a problem in front of me, and I had to think, experiment, read, fail, and eventually figure it out.

And, strangely enough, I miss some of that.

Writing code isn't as much fun anymore.

There used to be a certain tension when a deadline was getting close and the project wasn't done yet. You didn't know exactly how you were going to solve everything, but eventually things came together. There was a real sense of accomplishment in getting it over the line.

A lot of that feeling is disappearing for me.

Now, much of my day feels almost administrative.

I describe what I need, have a conversation with AI, review what it produces, make corrections, and move on to the next thing.

The work gets done faster. I can accomplish much more. Deadlines feel less intimidating.

Objectively, that's probably a good thing.

But something about the craft feels different.

I'm not reading as many technical books. I'm not doing as many tutorials. I'm having a lot more conversations with AI instead.

And I've noticed that the way I learn has changed too.

Before, I felt that I needed to know the answer. I would read a book, watch a course, learn a framework or study an API so that when a problem appeared, I had the knowledge to solve it.

Now, I don't necessarily need to know the answer beforehand.

I need to know how to find it, how to ask the right questions, how to understand the options AI gives me, and — probably most importantly — how to recognise which option makes the most sense at that moment.

Maybe that's a skill in itself. But it feels very different from the way I spent most of my career learning.

And AI is making me question other things I've taken for granted.

If AI writes the code, reviews the code, and writes the tests, do we still need the same approach to unit testing? I'm finding myself more interested in Playwright and validating that the application actually works from the user's perspective.

Do we even need frameworks as often as we used to?

I'm currently working on a project with no frontend framework at all, and the experience has been surprisingly good. When generating and changing code becomes cheap, some of the reasons we accepted additional abstractions may be worth questioning again.

I don't have answers to all of this yet.

I know we're living through a transition. Technology has always changed, and developers have always had to adapt with it. Maybe this is simply another one of those moments, only much bigger and much faster.

Maybe the answer is to keep adjusting and accept that constant change has always been part of working in technology.

But the uncomfortable part is that I have no idea where this transition ends.

I don't know what the software job market will look like in two years, five years, or whether it will ever look like the market we knew before.

And sometimes I catch myself wondering something I never really thought about before:

Could this be my last job as a software developer?

Not because I plan to stop.

But because I genuinely don't know what this profession will look like by the time I need the next one.

I often read that senior developers will still be needed because someone has to understand the architecture, make the right decisions, review the AI-generated code, and know what should be built.

Maybe that's true.

But sometimes I wonder if that's just the answer we developers want to believe.

Maybe the simpler and more uncomfortable possibility is that many of the skills that made us valuable are becoming less scarce. Maybe we're reluctant to accept that parts of what we've spent years becoming good at are turning into relics of a different era.

And maybe AI won't replace software developers overnight.

Maybe it doesn't need to.

It can replace pieces of what we do, one after another, while fewer people accomplish more and the role gradually becomes something else.

I don't know if that's where we're heading.

And I think that's the hardest part of this transition: not knowing.

For now, I'm learning to work differently.

Maybe knowing the answer matters less than knowing how to find it, question it, and decide whether it's actually a good answer.

But I keep coming back to the same question:

If writing code is no longer the difficult part — and perhaps not even the fun part — what does being a senior developer actually mean?