I am far from the first person to write about AI in tech and I doubt I'm going to be the last. It's the hot topic of the day and that inevitably makes discussion prone to stir up a storm. I am nearing ten years in the industry. In this time I have seen my fair share of trends come and go and through it all I've noticed something interesting. Somewhere around 2019 I remember Webflow breaking into the scene along with other no-code tools. “That's it we were told”, developers - especially front-end developers - are redundant. Webflow came and went, and so did the online gurus who rode on its hype and claimed the extinction of the front-end dev. Framer site rose and fell in the same cycle and still we are here. It wasn't the first and it wasn't the last.
I give this context to try to set the stage for the scene of AI coding tools. Now, the last thing I am trying to do in this article is bash either these tools or the people who use them. Rather, I want to offer a more calculated perspective on what these tools mean for the modern developer and for the future of development. I say this because it is absolutely not difficult to find an opinion on AI online today. Open up LinkedIn or X and you'll see the next wanna be rockstar CEO or CTO spouting how this AI or that model has finally done what no tool before has accomplished. It has made an entire work sector redundant. We are probably on our third round now of AI tools that killed us and still we live. So what gives?
This article is an attempt to throw my hat in the ring and hopefully to share some of my thoughts as to the future of AI in tech. More specifically, I would like to try and make this article something that can help guide you away from misunderstandings around AI and towards and more empowered knowledge of how to use it. I hope that you can walk away from this article able to see your job, as well as AI tools, in a new light.
Understanding AI Agents
The primary gripe I have with this new narrative is that those who espouse it clearly don't understand how development works. Being careful, I'm not saying they are stupid or that even that they aren't capable developers. Rather, it seems to me that they are out of touch or don't know what makes a good developer. To put it more succinctly, these see that AI agents can code and that they can code a lot, and they think that is all that is encapsulated in a developers day to day work. Yet the evidence speaks against this. Why do massive fortune 500 companies not go to their local WordPress factory style agency that could pump out a generic website for them in 2 weeks. Why do they spend millions going to boutique agencies who take months to build them a site from the ground up? The reason is that how well you can do something matters as much as whether or not you can do it. A company wants a site that is tailored to them and their needs, but their expertise don't lie in websites. What they want from a boutique agency is not simply someone to build something for them, but someone to help them understand what they want to build.
The problem with the “coding is dead” narrative is that it sees developers as nothing more than task monkeys that get given a list of things to do and just sit down and do them. Sure, there is maybe some difficult maths here and a weird bug to solve there, but in essence they have an understanding of development, sans passion. When the rubber meets the road, there is something crucial that separates a good developer from a bad one: how much they care about the work they are doing. A developer who doesn't care will receive a set of tasks and do everything they can to get those tasks off their plate with as little effort as possible. Missed requirements? Who cares? The tasks doesn't make sense from a user’s perspective? As long as it doesn't make my life difficult, what's the issue. A good developer, on the other hand has empathy and passion. They want to make something that solves a problem, that fixes something that was broken or bridges a gap that couldn't be crossed. A passionate developer can see beyond a task and will produce something that is entirely different from what a passionless developer would.
AI Agents, the New Passionless Developers
AI coding tools are like those passionless developers. Yes, they can complete tasks as they are given to them. In a sense, they can even be worse because unlike those passionless developers these agents don't have a sense of laziness. They are given an input and they will give an output that matches that output. Simple as that. Even if they are coded to be “pleasers” they still are restrained to the bounds of as much information as you give to them and will not go outside those lines. Yes, I can ask ChatGPT or Claude to build a website for me. The end product might even be something that looks like a serviceable site. Yet, it lacks something (aside from performance and often accessibility). It lacks a factor of delight and intuitiveness. It lacks a broad and overarching understanding or care for what is being built. It lacks the emotional insight and intuition of a passionate developer.
An AI cannot act on its own. It cannot take initiative. Most importantly, it cannot make something new. AIs copy an imitate and replicate, they don't create. They don't come up with new things. At least not without being told exactly what new thing to create by a human. Vibe coding isn't new, it's copying and pasting from Stack overflow on steroids. An AI is a very obedient extremely fast servant that will do exactly what you tell it to.
Now, perhaps reading this you might think that I am going to say “don't worry” your job as a developer is safe. I'm not. I don't know what the future holds. However, I can offer a guess as to what is going to happen. Development won't die, but passionless development will. At least, it will be taken over by tools that can build passionless things quicker. A morbid way of putting it is that those who use AI to complete - that is do - a majority of their work will find themselves replaced by ever improving AI. Their skills will be come less and less necessary and easier to replace. On the flip side, passionate developers - those that bring innovation, passion and emotion into their work - will grow in value as they become more and more rare. The value of human involvement in code will skyrocket as people seek that which is real.
The future of development is going to look leaps and bounds different from what we see around us today. Already we see today that a good developer can use AI tools to create in half the time it used to take. The future will see AI powered development that allows us to build faster than we have ever built before. Developers, let's learn to use these tools instead of hiding behind them. Let us keep pushing to make websites that move people and solve human problems. Let us keep making work that is real. Let us not become developers sans passion.