My personal experience with artificial intelligence invading my field
I have spent so many hours in the past as I debugged, tracing the same bug in an endless loop. This was how it used to be and we as developers would spend time working odd hours, solving problems that demanded not just skill but also persistence.
But something had changed recently.
AI has finally reached the doorstep of software development. I hardly paid attention, though. AI was something I read about.
It was something we’d discuss at the occasional tech meetup as this far-off possibility, like self-driving cars or space travel for everyone. It didn’t feel like a big danger to what I did anytime soon.
It calls for more than just a set of rules; it calls for knowledge, problem-solving, and even a kind of creative instinct to my thinking, uniquely human.
Then came the AI assistants.
They started with small, simple tools that’d suggest better code snippets or auto-complete my lines based on common patterns. It made life easier and streamlined the tedious parts of the job.
Who would not want help with that?
It was a colleague who never knew the wrong syntax. They could recall documentation from any obscure library instantly.
What was initially just a tool to help me write code slowly evolved into something more than that which understood patterns far better than myself.
I was surprised at first by the efficiency with which I could rewrite this code that, in the old days, would have taken me hours to refactor. In no time at all, things that, before the AI’s magic, would have taken up whole functions — that is, improvements that not only reduced complexity but somehow seemed to anticipate future problems coming along.
AI was starting to nudge me ahead through a sea of decisions I hadn’t even thought of yet.
But it wasn’t until I found myself relying on it more and more that I began to wonder where all of this was heading.
One evening, I sat and stared at the complicated algorithm for days and I had written and rewritten it so many times.
The puzzled expression on my face must have told it I needed a small bit of nudging at the algorithm. Maybe it would find the minute tweak or draw my eye to something I hadn’t noticed.
It replaced the function entirely.
What it produced was far neater than anything I could ever think of. It was a cleaner, faster, and more modular-a textbook example of efficient coding.
I sat back, stunned. I didn’t feel that rush of accomplishment that usually followed finally getting around some tough problem. Instead, there was this disquieting feeling of realization and the machine had outsmarted me.
And worse, had done it effortlessly.
It hit me that this was no longer an assistant but much bigger.
I tried to rationalize it at first. It was only doing what it was made to do, I said to myself. It wasn’t thinking like me. It wasn’t human.
In the weeks that followed, however, I started to see a pattern. It could solve problems in half the time it took me to work them out. It wasn’t just suggesting things anymore; it was leading the way, showing things I’d never thought of before.
Developers everywhere were starting to feel it too. The conversations that had been drifting in the online forums from excitement about how AI was helping us to worried whispers about how much control we were giving it grew softer and more hesitant.
Some would argue that it was just a tool. But others began wondering if the future of our profession was as secure as we thought.
At one point, I was working with one junior developer explaining how I solved a tricky integration problem. The developer had me midway through the solution explanation when he casually tossed a bombshell that AI already had the integration code written for them, but not only that: it even did it before they realized what the problem was.
I smiled, but inside something was taken away from me, not jealousy as I would call it, but more of a loss. I remember when I was learning how to code through trial and error, or late nights digging through documentation and endless Stack Overflow posts.
It wasn’t just writing the code—it was all about understanding the problem, experiencing frustration with failure, and finally the joy of getting it right.
But what of future developers?
Would they be able to know the subtlety of the craft or just overseers who would go ahead and approve the suggestion as it came from a machine?
I phased myself out of this role as the AI became smarter. It reached a point when I stopped looking at it for solving a problem, and was reviewing the output the AI itself would have generated.
Of course, I felt that I should have made my decisions, but most of the time I did agree with its decisions. The idea did cross my mind many times: Was this how it was going to be a developer now?
Still, I couldn’t help but notice the benefits. Projects that would have taken weeks were now being done in days. Bugs were caught before they ever hit production.
Efficiency was undeniable, and clients were happy for faster turnaround. But every time I marvelled at the pace of delivery, another tiny piece of me wondered what we were sacrificing in return.
Well, I tried my best to put all that aside. Now, technology evolves and we do too. It was not like this was the first change in the industry. With cloud computing, we adapted. With a shift in frameworks, we learned new ones.
So, what’s so different about AI?
And yet, I knew it was, deep down inside; it had the potential to drastically alter the very fabric of what it meant to be a developer, much more than a new tool or new framework.
Months have passed, and I chatted with an old colleague—one who has been here much longer than me. We both talked about the early days of development, the way coding was more of a craft, honed through years of experience. I asked him what he thought about AI, and the direction we’re going.
He looked ahead for what felt like a long time before speaking. “We’ll always need developers,” he said finally. “But the kind of developer we need is changing.”
That line has stayed with me. The kind of developer we need is changing.
It wasn’t whether AI was going to replace us; it was how we were going to adapt to that reality. As I thought more about it, the first thing that came to me is being a developer never has been merely writing code and it’s more about solving problems, creating solutions, and building something from nothing. So, here come tools, and tools always changed. And then there’s whose power is more than virtually anything else.
I then realized that the future was not about fighting the AI, but embracing it, learning to work with it, and muster ways to leverage it in our toolkit as part of our new paradigm.
Much like we moved from low-level programming languages to higher-level ones, but still, it is we who, as developers, would give the direction, the creativity, and the human insight that would shape the final output.
I don’t know exactly what the future is. But one thing is for sure: we developers are not leaving.
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Top comments (4)
"We are the Borg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile."
But in all seriousness I see it as a massive productivity booster. What would take me weeks now takes days when doing solo projects. Will it replace home grown developers? Probably not. Will it replace offshore developers? Maybe. We need to give it another year or two to really see what will happen.
Every time I read an article like this, I'm waiting for the bombshell reveal that it was written by AI.
I agree with your coworker, and yourself. I resented it at first, because there was no longer any business justification for writing my own code. And I enjoyed writing code.
I embraced the productivity increases as well. And accepted that this was still "coding" but it was just a new programming language that I was learning to embrace, English.
However, at the moment I'm kind of having a mixed bag with it. ChatGPT seems to get worse in the weeks/months after a new model is released. I've been posting in all the threads over on the forum where people have also noticed it. It was terrible for a while with 4, and made headlines for becoming "lazy".
Then 4.o came out and everything was amazing for a while, but now it has been refined to the point of being dumb again. Its making syntax mistakes in mainstream languages, forgetting context, sometimes even in same message, but also many times in about three replies, going round in loops of bugs that it introduces, getting lazy again, and just being totally useless. It's a horrible frustrating experience.
And yet, if they can fix the recent regression, I don't really want it to get much smarter. There is at least some challenge to flexing my existing knowledge to get it to build better code than it would have offered up without my guidance. The "yes, sorry, you are correct" message that it says is the replacement of the old equivalent of the feeling when the code compiles.
I am still quite concerned that an advancement is going to come out that makes it produce entire features without much refinement. A lot of the stuff it gets caught out at the moment is not that it cannot do it, its just that there are a lot of implied parts that would need to be in the query to get it to do it in one go. I don't think that is unsolvable by a dedicated coding ai in the long run.
Two bad futures linger over me like a dark cloud. One is that programming becomes tedious because it barely needs me, and two is that it becomes so easy that the market is no longer gate kept by knowledge and it stops being something that I can make good money with.
The best outcome that I've seen predicted was in one of Prime's videos on YouTube. He basically said that the development landscape will just expand. AI won't put developers out of jobs. If they become more productive, then businesses requirements will just expand to fill out the new capabilities.
They have been trying to replace developers for years, but all they ever do is create a new abstraction of programming. The fact is that non-developers are not looking to take our jobs. Not everyone thinks logically or enjoys structuring things like we do.
It remains to be seen what effect the people on the edge will have with the industry. Those who wouldn't have been able to do the job before, but now the barrier to entry has been lowered for them. Will they rock the ship, or just be filtered out because the new minimum grade of productivity can be so much higher?
(And no, AI did not write this)
Wow, from start to end what a change of perspective. Lolz
My perspective changed as I scrolled through this at midnight, surprised by how realistic it was, compared to my own experience, I'd argue that chatgpt is still VERY bad at coding, it still don't understand much of the tools(frameworks) we use today, I worked with spring framework and I understand how bad chatgpt generates responses, it's sooooo funky.