Why AI is the Best Thing to Happen to Developer Jobs
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to name the unease I’ve felt for years in this industry. Looking back at my own writing, I realize many of my past posts—whether dissecting broken interview loops or the pedantry of pull requests—were just symptoms of a larger, underlying diagnosis.
For quite a while, the tech industry has been in a slow-rotting state of malaise—not because tools, processes, or collaboration mechanisms are inherently bad, but because we've elevated them to ends in themselves--used them to solve problems they were not inherently meant to solve. We've optimized for ceremony over creation, compliance over craft, and speed over meaningful progress. We've weaponized 'velocity,' prioritizing the speed of a release over its long-term viability, and favoring the rush to ship over shipping at the right moment.
It's been this way for a long time and I have harped on pull requests, interviews, and a litany of other topics because they exemplify this drift. But this isn't just an internal developer problem—end users are feeling this frustration, too. We all see it. You get an app update, only to find nothing but new icons and disrupted workflows that turn a one-step task into a three-step chore. There are no meaningful new features, and the same old bugs are still there to bother you.
Change, yes. Improvement? Not so much.
Throw in the advent of AI, and it feels like a breaking point. But I don't think we are looking at a collapse; instead, I believe we are standing on the precipice of a great revival—a return to true engineering
AI might actually be the catalyst of change, and for the good of the field.
For the first time, we have a tool powerful enough to absorb the institutionalized tedium we’ve built around ourselves. By delegating the digital plumbing to AI agents—the boilerplate, the repetitive scaffolding, the thousand small decisions that eat hours—we now have the opportunity to refocus ourselves on what is truely important--bringing value to the end user.
This shift has the potential to put engineers back in the forefront. It moves us away from obsessing over low-value details and back toward what we were meant to do: designing solutions.
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