The Myth of AI Replacing Developers

A lot of business leaders operate under faulty assumptions about artificial intelligence.

One of the most misguided is this - some expect AI to replace most of their development team.

I’ve been asked questions like how to achieve a 10x increase in a development team’s productivity, or if non-technical people can vibe-code the majority of a product and then hand it over to an experienced developer just to “finish the last few parts”

It’s completely understandable why people think this way. Some of the AI coding tools out there are truly amazing, and the marketing headlines are even more compelling. 

A non-coder really can vibe code an entire app by themselves in one day. But still, expecting a 10X acceleration or replacing your dev team is not a realistic expectation for most businesses.

Here’s the reason: 

Once you get past simple utility apps you start dealing with the multitude of issues that AI coding tools are not as good at handling such as bad data, legacy frameworks, unreliable integrations, and business users who are averse to change - what you need to solve these problems is real software engineering. 

AI coding agents amplify an engineer’s capabilities, as well as their faults. You want to accelerate your development processes? Get the best engineers and give them the best AI development tools.

AI lacks the necessary context and strategic judgment to replace the end to end system-level understanding that experienced engineers possess.

Instead of replacing developers who are now becoming more valuable with the use of AI tools, leaders should direct AI initiatives and ROI expectations toward simpler repetitive processes, such as transactional customer support and back-office operations.