I really enjoyed reading this excellent article by Andrea Chiarelli titled “Everybody Wants to Be a Dev“, and I would encourage you to read it too. People could use more songs sung by Satchmo-as-a-cat.
Like Andrea, I’ve seen this pattern over and over: the recurring dream that “we’ll just tell the machine what we want, and it will do it.” You can see it in big-picture movements like offshoring, and in countless tools that promised to make software development simple through drag-and-drop interfaces or more “natural” ways of expressing intent: HyperCard, Visual Basic, SQL, no-code platforms, and plenty of others.
Some of those tools were genuinely transformative. SQL, for example, absolutely changed (and continues to change) the world. But none of them eliminated the need for people who understand systems. They changed what development meant.
Even SGML, one of the foundations that eventually led to HTML and XML, came out of work led by Charles Goldfarb, a lawyer-turned-programmer. That detail feels fitting (SGML and later XML/HTML are pretty “word-y”). The history of software is full of attempts to let people express intent at a higher level. The hard part is that intent still has to become a working system.
My read: AI can be a very powerful tool, but is still often a solution in search of a problem. Anyone telling you that all you need is AI, and that developers are no longer necessary, is probably trying to sell you something.
It is an amazing technology, even if we still don’t fully understand or control its behavior. It can help people prototype faster. It can lower the cost of exploring ideas. But production-level software still requires judgment around architecture, accuracy, security, maintainability, and all the other things that determine whether a system actually holds up in the real world.