My career path is pretty unusual (though I do know others like me). Before being a software developer, I had been a designer. What does that have to do with anything? Well, I’m glad you asked! I realized that AI is doing something to development (and developers) that’s happened repeatedly to art and design.

First, there is the uncomfortable feeling that I (and others have voiced) have felt that AI takes the ‘fun’ out of work. We’re developers, we like solving problems, we like learning! AI sort of takes us out of that and relegates us to the higher level of just planning architecture and making sure our team of AI agents are completing their work. While some certainly aim and enjoy the management role of a senior developer, it’s not for everyone.

Second, AI as a tool opens up access to software development wide open to people who otherwise would never be able to make programs. Granted: This is not necessarily a bad thing. It creates accessibility! People who are interested, but may not have the time or the opportunity, can now participate and create. The downside of this is that it also allows people who don’t want to learn, or think that it will be an immediate shortcut to gaining expertise.

That assumption of expertise is what I realized I’d seen, experienced, and learned about in art and design. The most stereotypical example of this, is when anyone has seen some style of art¹ and someone goes “I could do that!” It is an near certainty that they will not recreate what they’ve seen. That has not been the case with art, it has not been the case with photography², it has not been the case in design in the digital age³.

A CEO who used to say: “Why does it matter what font we use?” now comes up to a dev team saying they’ve “Vibe coded a new version of their entire app.” That is what we’re experiencing in development. It didn’t kill the need for design, it won’t kill the need for developers.

It’s going to change things, but there is still going to need to be a need and reason to learn and be skillful as a developer. One of the more heartening things I’ve seen is that it’s not replacing developers at all. It’s allowing us to collaborate more (and I don’t just mean have more meetings). More on that another time.

Just know that development can now say they know what creative fields have gone through multiple times. Creatives survive, so will developers.

Footnotes

1. Sorry modern and postmodern art… You get shit on a lot for this… ↩

2. Consumer cameras let ANYONE become a photographer. But that does not mean you will make good photos. ↩

3. Same goes for adobe and photo editing or design work. I definitely have seen managers or clients not understand believe that what designers do is real work. ↩