Developers: Try to Kill ‘Em Off and They Come Back Like Giant Hogweeds
June 12, 2025
Just a dinobaby and no AI: How horrible an approach?
Developers, which probably extends to “coders” and “programmers”, have been an employee category of note for more than a half century. Even the esteemed Institute of Advanced Study enforced some boundaries between the “real” thinking mathematicians and the engineers who fooled around in the basement with a Stone Age computer.
Giant hogweeds can have negative impacts on humanoids who interact with them. Some say the same consequences ensue when accountants, lawyers, and MBAs engage in contact with programmers: Skin irritation and possibly blindness.
“The Recurring Cycle of ‘Developer Replacement’ Hype” addresses this boundary. The focus is on smart software which allegedly can do heavy-lifting programming. One of my team (Howard, the recipient of the old and forgotten Information Industry Association award for outstanding programming) is skeptical that AI can do what he does. I think that our work on the original MARS system which chugged along on the AT&T IBM MVS installation in Piscataway in the 1980s may have been a stretch for today’s coding wonders like Claude and ChatGPT. But who knows? Maybe these smart systems would have happily integrated Information Dimensions database with the MVS and allowed the newly formed Baby Bells to share certain data and “charge” one another for those bits? Trivial work now I suppose in the wonderful world of PL/1, Assembler, and the Basis “GO” instruction in one of today’s LLMs tuned to “do” code.
The write up points out that the tension between bean counters, MBAs and developers follows a cycle. Over time, different memes have surfaced suggesting that there was a better, faster, and cheaper way to “do” code than with programmers. Here are the “movements” or “memes” the author of the cited essay presents:
- No code or low code. The idea is that working in PL/1 or any other “language” can be streamlined with middleware between the human and the executables, the libraries, and the control instructions.
- The cloud revolution. The idea is that one just taps into really reliable and super secure services or micro services. One needs to hook these together and a robust application emerges.
- Offshore coding. The concept is simple: Code where it is cheap. The code just has to be good enough. The operative word is cheap. Note that I did not highlight secure, stable, extensible, and similar semi desirable attributes.
- AI coding assistants. Let smart software do the work. Microsoft allegedly produces oodles of code with its smart software. Google is similarly thrilled with the idea that quirky wizards can be allowed to find their future elsewhere.
The essay’s main point is that despite the memes, developers keep cropping up like those pesky giant hogweeds.
The essay states:
Here’s what the "AI will replace developers" crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it’s a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables. If AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, it’s really making it easier to create liability. When you can generate liability at unprecedented speed, the ability to manage and minimize that liability strategically becomes exponentially more valuable. This is particularly true because AI excels at local optimization but fails at global design. It can optimize individual functions but can’t determine whether a service should exist in the first place, or how it should interact with the broader system. When implementation speed increases dramatically, architectural mistakes get baked in before you realize they’re mistakes. For agency work building disposable marketing sites, this doesn’t matter. For systems that need to evolve over years, it’s catastrophic. The pattern of technological transformation remains consistent—sysadmins became DevOps engineers, backend developers became cloud architects—but AI accelerates everything. The skill that survives and thrives isn’t writing code. It’s architecting systems. And that’s the one thing AI can’t do.
I agree, but there are some things programmers can do that smart software cannot. Get medical insurance.
Stephen E Arnold, June 12, 2025
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