AI won’t “replace developers” any more than compilers “replaced programmers.” It’ll replace some tasks devs do today, and it’ll shift the job uphill. Here’s the pattern we’ve seen over and over: We used to write assembly → then C Then frameworks Then cloud + IaC (Terraform/K8s) Then CI/CD + managed services Now AI Every step: less hand-writing low-level glue, more specifying intent and constraints. What changes with AI is it becomes a really good proposal engine. It can spit out code, configs, tests, docs, refactors. That’s all cool, but the world you deploy into is still messy: prod incidents, compliance, security partial failures, weird business rules humans changing requirements, etc. Now… all that stuff doesn’t go away, so I think the job becomes less “type code all day” and more: Define interfaces/contracts (schemas, APIs, invariants) Define allowed behavior (policies, guardrails, workflows) Build the deterministic parts that enforce those rules Make systems observable and auditable (logs, traces, replayable changes) Review/validate AI-generated changes (like code review on steroids) Integrate everything with real infra and real constraints That’s already where senior dev work trends now anyway. AI just moves more people into that mode earlier, and it raises the bar on “you shipped it, you own it.” If you’re a dev: get good at system design, constraints, correctness, security, and debugging reality. AI can generate 80% of the code. The remaining 20% is the part that actually matters. Get familiar with the environment, but expect it to change drastically. As someone who has lived through the personal computer boom, this is like the 70’s and early 80’s when personal computing was gaining it’s footing. Once IBM standardized the PC Architecture, things exploded. We are not there yet with AI (current tools don’t cut it) but once some drops a coherent set of industry standards around how to make these things deterministic… profits. submitted by /u/Overall-Insect-164
Originally posted by u/Overall-Insect-164 on r/ArtificialInteligence