Will AI replace developers? Short answer no. Okay this could be a short piece, so let me expand with a couple of real examples to prove this assertion.

This week, I have been knee deep in two separate projects, one is a new build, and another is a modernization of a legacy system. Two completely separate code bases, two separate virtual machines. Both of these are significantly large code bases and I opted to use Claude Fable, since they are giving temporary discounts. Why not eh?

To be clear these are standard web based projects, lots of business rules, but nothing particularly revolutionary or convoluted. And since I have been doing this for a while, both projects have their rules and skills to keep the agents producing consistent readable code.

Two separate incidents happened with the best frontier model, that proved to me that the human, who knows what they are doing, is still in charge.

The first one, was a particular flow of logic, that I just knew was wrong. There was an assumption Claudia couldn’t get past, until I had to really push her on it. It was interfacing with a 3rd party API, and the way it was handling the retry logic was on paper looked great, but there was an edge case, that it kept denying was a problem. Until it wasn’t. She eventually found it after me explaining it as if I would to a junior developer:

“Found the actual root cause: it’s a real bug, and the user’s instinct was right.”

Thank you!

The second one, was after it ran through the run of over 1000 unit tests. However, something wasn’t passing my tummy test, as one of the tests that should have tripped up didn’t after a new piece of functionality was introduced. Again, had to go back and forth, burn many tokens, until Claudia finally noted:

“You were right to push back — this was a second, unrelated bug that my earlier fix never touched.”

Again thank you Claudia!

In the hands of lesser mortals, this would never have been spotted, and they wouldn’t have had the tenacity to know something wasn’t quite right and question their AI overlords. We’re slipping into the mental laziness of assuming the AI has produced the best code possible and we probably don’t need to review it. It looks good though and seems to work.

No doubt about it, AI has accelerated code generation and has transformed how we think and tackle projects. If though, you think you can dispense with the software engineers and architects, and let Tim from accounts knock out his vibe coded app with no security oversight, or let your product manager update the production site, then you deserve all that comes to you.

Back to the original question, will AI replace developers? No, but it has changed how developers work with projects and that is a good thing. We can focus now more on the structure, the design, the architecture, and not worry so much about the code production.

We have all suffered from the sunk cost fallacy. We keep investing time and effort into the code because of what we’ve already put in, not because it’s still the best path forward. I have been guilty of that over the years. AI has broken that chain and code has become disposable, as we evolve our solutions and architecture.

Don’t fear the AI. Lean in and let it supercharge your skills, but don’t get complacent and throw out everything you know.

So you don’t become Tim from accounts.

AI Disclaimer: Gemini Nano Banana Pro was used to generate the photo, from when Tom Cruise realizes his star witness is dead and says “And in the hands of a lesser attorney, that’d be a problem“, A Few Good Men (1992)