Today I experienced a classic senior developer moment. I spent an hour gathering information about a specific update to existing logic, then questioning it from all different sides. And when it was time to implement it, it took roughly one line change.

I, like you, am tired of constant doomsday scenarios around AI. Hyperbolic statements about 100x productivity per developer or mass layoffs caused by AI hype. Even though my brain loves the dopamine hit from reading all that hyperbolic nonsense, I try to consciously step back and look at the bigger picture.

Where are we actually heading?

As a developer who spent the last 20 years learning about technology and then using it in real world projects, I know that you have to learn the basics. In everything. And when I say everything I mean it.

Starting from the technical stack, your programming language, backend, frontend, the environment you are using on localhost, your testing environment, best practices in coding, deployment, using git. Through understanding how project management works, Agile, Scrum, planning, gathering information for tickets, communicating to stakeholders, gathering feedback.

To working with junior developers, passing along the knowledge, showing them how the standard of the work should look like.

And finally understanding how to talk to people and how to listen, which I am still learning. I find it the hardest thing.

That is twenty years of context AI simply does not have.

So when you take all that learning and look at how AI can help us, you see that AI will augment your work, not replace it. Unless the only thing you do at work is write code someone else told you to write.

For most of us it is about gathering information, making good decisions based on our knowledge and the context of the project or product. That is where our human part will shine.

That hour spent thinking through the problem is exactly where you should be. After that, let AI write the code.