There’s a new religion in town, and its gospel is preached from ergonomic chairs by self-declared “Tech Futurists” who haven’t written a line of code since HTML tables were cool. Their sacred belief? AI is going to replace all developers. Any day now. Totally. Just around the corner. Any minute.
These folks are everywhere—from VC meetings to LinkedIn manifestos—waxing poetic about a glorious future where software builds itself and engineers are free to “focus on strategy,” which, as we all know, means spending 70% of the day in Slack threads and Google Docs that say “circle back.”
The logic is simple: why learn programming when you can just prompt an AI like a wizard summoning code from the ether?
“Build me an app that connects dog walkers with crypto investors.”
“Make it scalable. And viral. Also, use Flutter. I think that’s still a thing.”
“Also can you deploy it? To, like, the cloud? You know, the blue one.”
And look, I love AI. It’s brilliant. It’s like having a junior developer who never sleeps, doesn’t ask for PTO, and confidently gives you answers that are 80% correct and 100% dangerous.
Ask it to write a login system? Sure—it might even remember to hash passwords this time. Might.
But that’s the thing. The same people who think ChatGPT will build the next Facebook are the ones who install one WordPress plugin and update their résumé to “Full-Stack AI Architect.”
News flash: Copy-pasting an AI-generated React component is not development. It’s wishful thinking with syntax.
Yet here we are—drowning in Medium posts titled “How I Built a SaaS with Zero Code and Unlimited Optimism”—authored by someone whose biggest technical achievement is getting Copilot to autocomplete console.log(“Hello World”).
Meanwhile, real developers are still doing the dirty work: fixing race conditions, optimizing queries, untangling legacy spaghetti, and reverse-engineering that one API written in 2007 by someone who thought comments were for the weak.
But sure, let’s all believe AI is going to replace them. Let’s pretend a chatbot that still confuses Python 2 and Python 3 is ready to handle your enterprise microservice architecture.
In the end, AI is powerful. It’s a tool. A damn good one. But tools don’t replace people who know how to use them—they just replace people who never learned.
So to the AI-dependent, code-averse dreamers out there: keep believing. Keep prompting. Keep manifesting your unicorn startup. The rest of us will be over here… building it properly.
