IMO the clearest, most thoughtful take yet on the endless “Will AI replace developers?” debate.

It perfectly captures what I’ve been feeling for a while:

AI coding assistants are genuinely transformative. They’re incredibly useful and will fundamentally change how we build software. But the real value of developers has never been in typing code, it’s always been in wrestling with the irreducible complexity of the problems we’re solving.

That deep, careful thinking, understanding context, navigating trade-offs, reasoning through edge cases, ensuring systems actually work in the real world doesn’t vanish just because an AI can generate syntax faster. Even in a future where AI writes most of the code, someone still has to do the thinking.

And if models keep advancing until they can handle that thinking too? Then we have two paths: 1 - We level up—tackling even bigger, more intricate problems that remain beyond the reach of even the best models. 2 - Or we accept that humans no longer have a unique role in “thinking” about complex systems… and I’m too much of a humanist to believe we’ll ever let that happen.

The dream of replacing developers keeps recurring because the constraint isn’t mechanical, it’s intellectual. Tools like AI help us express our thinking more efficiently, but they don’t eliminate the need for the thinking itself.

https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2025/12/07/the-recurring-dream-of-replacing-developers.html