Weren't we supposed to be replaced by AI by now? Or at least work less? AI agents were supposed to take over the world. So when exactly is that going to happen, and why are we still working so much?
Because we can't pretend that nothing has changed. Even at my workplace, where data security is valued above pretty much everything else, we're already using AI coding agents. Which, in my opinion, means they're basically everywhere by now.
Simple features practically write themselves, and even debugging, including in legacy applications, has become significantly easier.
And we're only at the beginning of this revolution!
What Happens When AI Can Do Everything?
A friend and colleague of mine recently encouraged me to write an article about how to get into AI before it's too late. After all, someone will have to build this revolution, right?
Soon, applications will practically write themselves. AI will even be sitting in your toilet, politely suggesting that it's time to get up before you give yourself hemorrhoids. xD So what should we do to avoid being pushed out of the job market?
Since I know a thing or two about AI agents, and I've been in this industry for quite a while, I started researching what the next few years might look like. And the longer I researched, the more pessimistic I became. Because sure, right now we have huge conferences dedicated to AI agents. We're trying to build them properly, make them secure, reliable, and so on.
But what happens in a few years, when we've solved those problems too, and an agent can spin up ten sub-agents of its own from a single prompt? Where exactly will developers fit into that picture?
(Okay, for now I still get the impression that hardly anyone even knows what tool calling or WebMCP is. 😅 But maybe that's just a matter of time?)
There's One Problem With Replacing Everyone...
Okay, but there's a catch in this whole theory. Sometimes, when I hear people talking about how "AI is going to replace all of us," I feel like we're forgetting something pretty important. If a massive company can be run by just a handful of people thanks to AI, and most of the population ends up unemployed, who exactly are those companies going to sell their products to? People need to earn money to buy things, after all!
Now, let's throw all restraint out the window and go full science fiction. Imagine it's 2031. Autonomous AI agents do practically everything. Humans are left with manual jobs, like plumbers or hairdressers.
But even those people have hardly any customers, because everyone else is unemployed and desperately cutting back on unnecessary expenses.
The economy starts collapsing. People start protesting. So what do governments do? To prevent a full-blown revolt and keep themselves in power, they start introducing laws designed to bring humans back into the workforce.
Or Maybe We Could Finally Work Less?
Maybe in five or ten years, software engineering won't be a job for people who actually know how to program or understand the technology. Maybe it'll be something literally anyone can do.
But perhaps we should take this idea even further. Instead of throwing people out of their jobs, why not take advantage of how productive AI agents are and let people work part-time for the same salary Maybe we could work three days instead of five, and spend the rest of our time doing whatever we want: relaxing, learning new things, developing ourselves?
Oh, what a beautiful vision! Just imagine how many articles I could write. I'd finally get enough sleep. I might even find time to deal with that enormous pile of clothes sitting in my wardrobe, which currently has approximately zero priority in my life! 🤯
But there's just one tiny problem with this wonderful vision. Where is all that free time we've been promised since the invention of the steam engine? Because I'm certainly not working less!
AI Makes Us More Productive. So Why Are We Working More?
Quite the opposite, actually. I feel like I'm working more and more, and expectations keep growing, because "AI will help you with that." And yes, some of the actual coding, the part so many of us genuinely enjoyed, has already been partially automated.
But what about everything else? The coordination, the endless meetings, the constant effort to make sure the entire project doesn't fall apart?
Don't you get the impression that because it seems like we should be able to deliver more, that's exactly what we keep trying to do? And somehow, it doesn't always work out the way we expected?
I also feel like AI adoption in companies is still in its infancy, even if everyone already has a paid subscription to a coding agent. Someone still needs to think about the architecture. Someone needs to figure out how to automate the agent's work in the first place.
Yes, I keep hearing about entire workflows handled by "armies of agents." But aren't those mostly greenfield projects? Because I have a feeling that legacy applications still play by their own rules.
And the good old biological human is still the bottleneck... Or maybe we're not the bottleneck at all? 😉
And What About Junior Developers?
And yes, it's hard to disagree that junior developers have it tough right now. Partly because of AI, absolutely. But not only because of AI.
Ten years ago, the demand for developers was so enormous that companies would hire practically anyone who could write export class. Some companies even organized their own bootcamps to train future employees.
But those days were already coming to an end before AI arrived. People realized that IT offered a relatively easy and comfortable way to make good money, so more and more people entered the industry, and the market simply became saturated.
AI just hammered the final nail into the coffin.
So... What's the Plan?
And now I'm genuinely curious what you think. I really don't want this article to be one of those "look how brilliant Sylwia is, she has figured out the entire future of software engineering" pieces. Because I haven't! I genuinely don't know.
How do you see the future of our industry? Are we all going to end up unemployed? Will entirely new engineering professions emerge, jobs we can't even imagine today?
Or maybe, and this is my personal dream, civilization will finally manage to do something that actually benefits human beings, and we'll end up with a three-day workweek?
I'd really love to hear your thoughts!
BTW, check out this video! Who is that absolutely gorgeous person on the thumbnail? If I'm ever forced to create a Tinder profile, I'm definitely using that picture. Inside the video, though, it's just regular Sylwia talking about application migration like she always does. So if you're interested, feel free to give it a watch! ☺️
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Top comments (5)
There's one thing I keep thinking about, especially when it comes to developers starting out. If an agent writes most of the code, where do they get the experience of debugging something that doesn't make sense, tracing a race condition, or figuring out why a system behaves differently under production load?
I've seen how much understanding comes from chasing a problem across service boundaries, database transactions and message queues. You don't get that just by reading the final solution.
AI can speed up the implementation, but if people skip the reasoning behind it, we're going to end up with developers who can ship features without really understanding what they're shipping. That's a much bigger problem than code generation itself.
Exactly! And I still remember how much time we spent figuring things out, experimenting, making mistakes, and trying again until something finally worked. That's how we learned so much!
Of course, junior developers can still code on their own at home, without AI or with minimal assistance, to build that experience. But let's be realistic, how many people will actually do that? We all have jobs, families, household responsibilities, and a million other things to take care of. And when there's a tool that can do the work in seconds, it's pretty hard to resist using it!
This is exactly what’s been on my mind for a while too. I usually put it like this: Is it worth setting humanity aside on the altar of endless technological progress? My answer is obviously NO. I say that even though I’ve clearly been caught up in the flow myself. The scary part isn’t even that agents can code, among other things. Some people still reassure themselves that all they do is statistically predict the next word. The situation is more alarming than that. Patterns have formed inside these models by filtering through humanity’s written knowledge, and for a few months now, these models have even been consciously seeing.
But this period is both a curse and a blessing. To me, it feels like a gold rush that will last a very short time, when everyone can run toward their goals. The question is: what are those goals for each of us? Is there anything we can personally do in this situation? Obviously, we can’t stop the tech giants, and perhaps we don’t even want to. Instead, we floor the accelerator and enjoy the wind in our hair as we race toward the cliff.
I say we should appreciate our legacy work, because a badly functioning system gives far more people work than a well-functioning one. Let’s keep struggling and sharpening our skills through work. Now that an agent does our work for us, we have time to develop other abilities too, and to care for the people we love. I feel this applies equally to old hands and beginners. Of course, beginners are at a disadvantage. Unfortunately, they have very little time, and less and less of it, to understand themselves and build some kind of defense mechanism. They need to learn quickly how to process information critically, because I’m saying nothing new when I point out that the media has been constantly trying to steer us for decades.
Finally, it’s no coincidence that I wrote out an 80,000-character role-playing session. I put my own answer in there, in my usual indirect way.
Great thoughts!
My view is that the AI bubble hasn't burst yet. Using AI is still relatively cheap, and I suspect a lot of the real cost is being subsidized. Once we have to pay the full price, we'll see how much we actually use it every day.
But AI has already changed how we work, and I do think we'll need fewer people in our industry. What worries me is what happens when the bubble bursts and a lot of startups built around cheap AI APIs start crashing. But that's just my prediction.
There are three things I'm more confident about.
First, even the best agents, like Fable, Argon, and Astra, deliver impressive results, but I doubt they're affordable enough to replace developers at scale. So we end up using cheaper, less capable agents that still need human supervision.
Second, I get mad at AI agents almost every day. 🤣 They make wrong assumptions, add unnecessary code, or turn simple features into something much more complex than necessary. Someone still has to review and fix all of that.
Third, security. Even my small experiments have shown how easily AI agents can be tricked, and sometimes it doesn't take much effort at all. (And I already have another article ready about tricking AI agents through WebMCP. 😁)
So yes, I think OpenAI and Anthropic are overselling the idea of AI replacing developers. The compute needed to do that reliably at scale would be extremely expensive, and you'd still need experienced people to supervise those agents.
But I wouldn't complain about a three-day workweek! Although, considering Altman's recent comments about RAM, I'm starting to wonder if the plan is to replace developers or just take all the RAM from our PCs first. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I think the biggest question isn't whether AI will replace developers, but whether increased productivity will actually improve our lives.
There's a real risk that companies will turn every efficiency gain into higher expectations rather than shorter working hours. And for junior developers, there's another challenge: if AI does more of the actual coding, how will they get the experience needed to develop real engineering judgment? Maybe the real measure of AI's success shouldn't be how much work we can automate, but how much better it makes human life.
A three-day workweek would be a pretty meaningful start. 🙂