My personal experience with artificial intelligence invading my field

I have spent so many hours in the past as I debugged, tracing the same bug in an endless loop. This was how it used to be and we as developers would spend time working odd hours, solving problems that demanded not just skill but also persistence.

But something had changed recently.

AI has finally reached the doorstep of software development. I hardly paid attention, though. AI was something I read about.

It was something we’d discuss at the occasional tech meetup as this far-off possibility, like self-driving cars or space travel for everyone. It didn’t feel like a big danger to what I did anytime soon.

It calls for more than just a set of rules; it calls for knowledge, problem-solving, and even a kind of creative instinct to my thinking, uniquely human.

Then came the AI assistants.

They started with small, simple tools that’d suggest better code snippets or auto-complete my lines based on common patterns. It made life easier and streamlined the tedious parts of the job.

Who would not want help with that?

It was a colleague who never knew the wrong syntax. They could recall documentation from any obscure library instantly.

What was initially just a tool to help me write code slowly evolved into something more than that which understood patterns far better than myself.

I was surprised at first by the efficiency with which I could rewrite this code that, in the old days, would have taken me hours to refactor. In no time at all, things that, before the AI’s magic, would have taken up whole functions — that is, improvements that not only reduced complexity but somehow seemed to anticipate future problems coming along.

AI was starting to nudge me ahead through a sea of decisions I hadn’t even thought of yet.

But it wasn’t until I found myself relying on it more and more that I began to wonder where all of this was heading.

One evening, I sat and stared at the complicated algorithm for days and I had written and rewritten it so many times.

The puzzled expression on my face must have told it I needed a small bit of nudging at the algorithm. Maybe it would find the minute tweak or draw my eye to something I hadn’t noticed.

It replaced the function entirely.

What it produced was far neater than anything I could ever think of. It was a cleaner, faster, and more modular-a textbook example of efficient coding.

I sat back, stunned. I didn’t feel that rush of accomplishment that usually followed finally getting around some tough problem. Instead, there was this disquieting feeling of realization and the machine had outsmarted me.

And worse, had done it effortlessly.

It hit me that this was no longer an assistant but much bigger.

I tried to rationalize it at first. It was only doing what it was made to do, I said to myself. It wasn’t thinking like me. It wasn’t human.

In the weeks that followed, however, I started to see a pattern. It could solve problems in half the time it took me to work them out. It wasn’t just suggesting things anymore; it was leading the way, showing things I’d never thought of before.

Developers everywhere were starting to feel it too. The conversations that had been drifting in the online forums from excitement about how AI was helping us to worried whispers about how much control we were giving it grew softer and more hesitant.

Some would argue that it was just a tool. But others began wondering if the future of our profession was as secure as we thought.

At one point, I was working with one junior developer explaining how I solved a tricky integration problem. The developer had me midway through the solution explanation when he casually tossed a bombshell that AI already had the integration code written for them, but not only that: it even did it before they realized what the problem was.

I smiled, but inside something was taken away from me, not jealousy as I would call it, but more of a loss. I remember when I was learning how to code through trial and error, or late nights digging through documentation and endless Stack Overflow posts.

It wasn’t just writing the code—it was all about understanding the problem, experiencing frustration with failure, and finally the joy of getting it right.

• But what of future developers?

• Would they be able to know the subtlety of the craft or just overseers who would go ahead and approve the suggestion as it came from a machine?

I phased myself out of this role as the AI became smarter. It reached a point when I stopped looking at it for solving a problem, and was reviewing the output the AI itself would have generated.

Of course, I felt that I should have made my decisions, but most of the time I did agree with its decisions. The idea did cross my mind many times: Was this how it was going to be a developer now?

Still, I couldn’t help but notice the benefits. Projects that would have taken weeks were now being done in days. Bugs were caught before they ever hit production.

Efficiency was undeniable, and clients were happy for faster turnaround. But every time I marvelled at the pace of delivery, another tiny piece of me wondered what we were sacrificing in return.

Well, I tried my best to put all that aside. Now, technology evolves and we do too. It was not like this was the first change in the industry. With cloud computing, we adapted. With a shift in frameworks, we learned new ones.

So, what’s so different about AI?

And yet, I knew it was, deep down inside; it had the potential to drastically alter the very fabric of what it meant to be a developer, much more than a new tool or new framework.

Months have passed, and I chatted with an old colleague—one who has been here much longer than me. We both talked about the early days of development, the way coding was more of a craft, honed through years of experience. I asked him what he thought about AI, and the direction we’re going.

He looked ahead for what felt like a long time before speaking. “We’ll always need developers,” he said finally. “But the kind of developer we need is changing.”

That line has stayed with me. The kind of developer we need is changing.

It wasn’t whether AI was going to replace us; it was how we were going to adapt to that reality. As I thought more about it, the first thing that came to me is being a developer never has been merely writing code and it’s more about solving problems, creating solutions, and building something from nothing. So, here come tools, and tools always changed. And then there’s whose power is more than virtually anything else.

I then realized that the future was not about fighting the AI, but embracing it, learning to work with it, and muster ways to leverage it in our toolkit as part of our new paradigm.

Much like we moved from low-level programming languages to higher-level ones, but still, it is we who, as developers, would give the direction, the creativity, and the human insight that would shape the final output.

I don’t know exactly what the future is. But one thing is for sure: we developers are not leaving.

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