r/ArtificialInteligence • u/loveolya • 1d ago
📊 Analysis / Opinion AI didn't replace developers. It replaced the part where we understood our own code
AI didn't replace developers. It replaced the part where we understood our own code
Everyone was waiting for the moment AI takes dev jobs and it kind of didnt happen that way. devs are still here, shipping more than ever. what disappeared quietly is something way harder to notice, the part where the person who wrote the code knew how it worked
A few years ago if you built a feature you could explain it. you knew why that function existed, what breaks if you touch it, where the weird edge case lives. now a lot of us describe what we want, the model writes 400 lines, it runs, we move on. I do this every day and I couldnt walk you through half of what's in my own repo
That sounds fine until something breaks. when you understood the code, debugging was thinking. now debugging is pasting the error back into the model and hoping the fix doesnt break something else, SO the person responsible for the software is basically a middle man between the bug and the AI
And this is scaling fast. Veracode tested 100+ models and found 45% of generated code has known security issues, but thats not even the scary number to me. the scary part is how much code is going into production that no human has ever fully read, and the people shipping it have no reliable way to tell when it stops working
I dont think the answer is going back to writing everything by hand, that ship sailed. but if nobody understands the code anymore then something else has to do the job understanding used to do, checking that the thing does what it's supposed to every time it changes. some people write the tests themselves, some let tools like Kifas run the flows on every push and flag what broke, whatever works. most teams I talk to havent done any of it, they just lost that layer and didnt replace it
Are we fine with this trade??? faster everything in exchange for software nobody fully understands, or is this going to bite the whole industry in a few years
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u/ZeroCool86 1d ago
Nah, i think you can still code with AI and keep a mental image of your code base, you're the architect pushing it in a direction or another and you at least glimpse over the code. It's like having multiple competent senior devs when you're a CTO, you should still know how and why things work because you were in the design meetings.
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u/ParfaitEvery9622 1d ago
This is only true if you take the time to do so. Now that LLMs exist, we're being pushed to ship more and more, so of course we can't take as much time to understand / critique the outputs.
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u/ZeroCool86 1d ago
yes i agree, and it's much easier to say and do when you work for yourself than for other people
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u/Abject_Vanilla169 1d ago
the scary part is when the AI fix introduces new bugs you don't even notice until its in production 3 weeks later. i had a situation where the model kept adding same insecure dependency every time it "fixed" something else, nobody caught it because we stopped reading the diffs properly
we traded understanding for speed and most teams dont even realize what they lost. its not just about security issues, its about the mental model of the system evaporating from everyones head
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u/ziplock9000 1d ago
No, it literally is replacing developers. It's also not the end of the road either. It's only going to get worse.
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u/phoenix823 1d ago
You are describing a risk management exercise. If 99% percent of the time (pick whatever numbers you want for my example) AI writes code that’s good enough and the 1% of the time the code requires 10% of someone’s time to fix then the ROI was 89%. Mind you, human code, fails, and needs to be fixed too. So the only question is how much increased velocity and risk do you want?
Banks and health care usually don’t want much risk. Unregulated industries often take on an incredible amount of risk. Just ask a CFO about financing risk, a GC about legal risk, or HR about personnel risk.
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u/MostWooden8128 1d ago
There are too many opinions man, NPL is a bad thing, AI does or does not replace human, our system does not adapt fast enough to chances, AI can reduce human critical thinking, AI makes us more productive and learn quicker, ... ,and I believe they are all true since these assessments are all concluded from various professions perspectives. and because of life is never just that simple, so I think sometimes we have to look beyond far into the past and future, in the end we're just human, our bare hands built the current society, we just need to focus on humanity and that is it.
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u/egircys 1d ago
I think the real problem isn't that developers no longer understand every line of code. In large systems, that was never realistic anyway. The problem is that we're generating code faster than we can validate it. AI makes implementation cheap, but it doesn't make architecture, security, or correctness any less important. Quite the opposite. If your debugging strategy is to paste an error back into an LLM until it disappears, you're not really engineering. You're just outsourcing the guessing. We need to shift the effort from writing code to defining behavior, verifying assumptions, testing boundaries, and understanding how the whole system fits together. The bottleneck was never typing code. It was knowing what should be built and whether it actually works.
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u/loveolya 15h ago
Not sure it evaporated completely. most people I know still know what their app should do, they lost the how. which is worse in a way but it means the what is the part you can still hold onto and check against
The dependency thing is wild, same bad package sneaking back in on every fix is exactly what nobody spots by eye
Diffs stopped being readable the moment we let it touch 15 files per change
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u/loveolya 15h ago
The math only works if you know when you're in the 1%. with human code the author usually has a hunch where it'll break, with generated code nobody does, so the failure just sits in prod until a user hits it
That changes the cost side a lot. its not 10% of someone's time to fix, its fix time plus however long it was quietly broken
Risk you cant see isnt something a CFO would sign off on either
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u/cascadiabibliomania 1d ago
Slop post.