I just got tired of the endless stream of: AI will replace developers AI will never replace developers this model changes everything this agent changes everything software engineering is dead software engineering has never been more important
The amount of code you can generate in an afternoon is honestly ridiculous compared to even a year ago.
And yet somehow we still have: overengineered backends seven abstractions around a simple database call dependency hell features nobody asked for microservices solving problems that did not exist teams proudly shipping complexity at machine speed
Developers love talking about coding as if typing the implementation is where all the value lives.
AI can give you 600 lines of perfectly respectable-looking code before you've finished your coffee.
Before, if you wanted to build an unnecessarily complicated system, you at least had to suffer for it.
You ask for a small feature and suddenly you've got: a service layer repository pattern dependency injection validation abstraction retry logic configuration objects three interfaces a factory
AI can now produce those reasonable decisions much faster than we can regret them.
Because if AI is going to write more of the implementation, I want the surrounding system to be painfully predictable.
Give me: boring databases boring APIs boring frameworks boring deployment obvious architecture code another human can understand without a diagram explaining the diagram
Toward: judgment architecture debugging product thinking taste knowing what to reject knowing when the AI is confidently wrong knowing when the correct implementation is no implementation
I think "taste" is going to become one of the most important engineering skills.
And if developers don't get better at filtering what gets generated, we may end up using the most powerful development tools we've ever created to produce the largest pile of mediocre software in history.
I use AI for coding, debugging, research, writing, exploring ideas and challenging my own solutions.
The interesting question now is whether we're actually getting better at deciding what software deserves to exist.
Does AI make developers better engineers — or just faster at producing whatever they were already going to build?