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AI Might Not Be Coming For Your Engineers After All?
I wonder if we’ve all had it backwards this whole time
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This past week I read the very interesting article Why Replacing Developers with AI is Going Horribly Wrong, hot on the heels of The Death of the Craftsman Engineer (And Why That’s Fine) and The AI Vampire, just a week or two after reading Anthropic’s 7 Billionaire Founders Just Pledged 80% of Their Wealth (Because They Know What’s Coming), and I’ve since been connecting the dots in a way that’s both surprising and exciting.
Preamble
For the last couple of years, the software industry has been buzzing with hype around replacing engineers with AI. Big companies have used this hype as an excuse to lay off workers (which has little to do with AI, and much to do with irresponsible management), as usual reminding us that “ruthless efficiency” trumps healthy organizations and psychological safety, and that we’re not family, but numbers on a bottom line that need to cost the company as little as they can get away with.
As someone who’s been using AI “copilots” since 2022, and who’s a big believer in agentic engineering, let me just say that AI models trained on code available on the internet is…
