Will AI Replace Developers? Only If They’re Doing The Wrong Work

A few months ago, I joined a dev team standup where two very different stories unfolded within 15 minutes of each other.

First up was Alex, a junior developer who was struggling through a simple backend task. He had been assigned to implement a CRUD endpoint for a new resource—something he’d done before, but still hadn’t quite mastered. 

He’d copied code from a past project, adjusted some variable names, and was now debugging a bizarre error that turned out to be a missing bracket and a typo in a route path. Total time spent so far: about an hour. Progress: minimal.

Right after him, Leila gave her update. She was wrapping up a new authentication flow using Loveable.

She’d scaffolded the whole thing in less than half an hour (after a very quick refactor), written tests, added error handling, and even dropped a few suggestions for how the product team could simplify the onboarding logic. Her work wasn’t just fast—it was thoughtful, extensible, and aligned with the business.

Same team. Same tools. Totally different outcomes.

That’s when it really clicked: AI isn’t killing developer jobs. But it is changing the definition of what a good developer actually looks like.

How AI Is Actually Impacting Developer Jobs

There’s a lot of noise right now about whether AI is going to replace developers. But if you’re close to the work, if you’ve been in the code and in the meetings where the real decisions get made, you know that’s the wrong question.

The Real Difference Between AI-Ready Developers and Everyone Else

There’s a subtle but important shift happening in how engineering teams function. Developers who treat AI as a tool—one that helps them prototype quickly, generate boilerplate, or unblock early thinking—are moving faster, solving harder problems, and spending more of their time on system design, integration, and business logic.

Developers who resist it and treat AI like cheating or avoid Loveable / Cursor out of pride or fear? 

They’re falling behind, not because they’re bad engineers, but because they’re spending more time on tasks that no longer require manual labor.

That doesn’t mean AI is “replacing” developers. It means the bar for developer productivity and value has gone up.

Here’s my caveat: it’s important to acknowledge that not every industry is rushing to adopt AI in development workflows—and for good reason.

In fields like hedge funds, financial services, and others where proprietary data and intellectual property are core assets, uploading internal code or documentation into a third-party LLM is simply too risky. Privacy concerns, compliance issues, and the potential exposure of sensitive algorithms mean that AI is often deliberately kept at arm’s length.

And that doesn’t mean those teams are falling behind, it just means their constraints are different. In highly regulated or IP-sensitive sectors, restraint is strategic. The evolution is still happening but it’s happening in parallel, not in lockstep.

I dig a lot deeper into this in the full blog post. 

AI Is Not Your Strategy

If you’re a founder or CTO wondering how to “leverage AI,” make sure you’re asking the right question.

AI isn’t your product strategy. It’s not your dev process. It’s not a replacement for critical thinking.

It’s a tool.

Used well, it can multiply your team’s impact. Used poorly—or used to paper over leadership dysfunction—it just accelerates failure.

So no, AI isn’t killing developer jobs, but it is forcing everyone to evolve. And the ones who don’t? They’ll be replaced—not by AI, but by other developers who know how to use it well.