AI is hitting people who write code before it hits anyone else. I started my career as a developer, and I still write code for side projects, but I don’t do that for a living. Therefore, I can look at what is happening with some distance, and it seems to me that how you feel about AI writing code depends on why you write code.
I never asked myself that question until I heard Rob Collie, in an episode of his podcast, make a distinction between two kinds of developers. This is a weekend thought, so don’t expect sources: one podcast and my own experience. I found the distinction useful, and here it is in my own words.
Hyper-logical developers are attracted to logical thinking. They like being in the “zone” while they are coding, paying attention to every detail. It seems they enjoy producing something correct and well built more than delivering the software they wrote to actual users. For example, they could rewrite the same function three times on a Sunday afternoon, when it was already working, just because it could be cleaner.
Hyper-creative developers are motivated by the feeling of creating something cool. The code is just the tool they use: the goal is delivering the product, and the code is what is needed to get there. If a tool gave them the same product without writing a single line, they’d take it, and they wouldn’t miss coding.
Now put an AI agent that writes code in front of these two groups. For the creative ones, AI is exciting, and probably addictive: they can build more things, faster, and they are happy to get rid of the part of the job (coding) that they were just tolerating. For the logical ones, the same AI agent is taking away exactly what they liked: the logic, the zone, the details. The same technology produces opposite reactions.
Nobody is removing coding tools from the toolset. You can still write code by hand, if you want. However, writing code by hand may no longer be a skill somebody pays for. That’s been true for many years for many people, but the world is changing fast. Besides, this already happened to other jobs. You can still buy a pair of handmade shoes, and some people do, but it’s a niche, and it’s not where most of the shoe industry’s revenue comes from.
At an industrial scale, I expect that AI will write code in most situations; the job of the human developer could become more about what the code produces than about the code itself. I don’t say this with enthusiasm, but I just don’t see what could stop it.
I guess that in a not-too-distant future, there will still be people who write code by hand, and it will be a very nice hobby. For the people who specifically love to look at hand-written code, there will probably be something like a modern art exhibition. As a job, writing code by hand will survive in a few very specific, high-level positions, where the requirement is something exceptional that AI cannot be trained for. Even then, nobody knows if AI will eventually do that too.
By the way, I’m already there: my code goes into side projects, nobody pays me for it, and I keep writing it anyway. But I’ve started vibe-coding entire applications. I’m in the middle, to be honest. However, if you’re one of the developers who love the code more than the product, this is probably where you’re going too, and it’s not a bad place. Code as a hobby.