Dev Is Not Dead. Dev Is Lazy.
Abstract
Everyone is afraid AI will take the developer's job, and almost nobody is doing anything about it. That is not a technology problem. It is a laziness problem, and it has a fix.
The Panic
We are all afraid that AI is going to take our jobs.[1] Ask anyone what they are doing about it and you get a long silence, followed by a joke about prompt engineering.
Dev is not dead. Dev is waiting for this to blow over.
What I Mean by Lazy
Not lazy at typing. Lazy at the two things this job always required: searching and learning. Read the docs. Look it up. Find out how the thing actually works. Learn the next thing before the current thing becomes a museum piece.
Meet Dave
Dave is fictional. Dave is also everyone.
Dave gets a bug on a Thursday. The error message is clear, specific, and links to the documentation. Dave does not click the link. Dave pastes the error into a chat window, receives a confident fix, pastes the fix into the code, and ships before lunch.
The fix works. Dave has no idea why. This is fine, because Dave has a theory about work-life balance, and the theory says that understanding things is overtime.
On Monday it breaks at a customer. The customer asks what happened. Dave opens the chat window to ask it what happened, and the chat window politely explains that it was not there.
AI did not take Dave’s job. Dave had already outsourced the half of it that a chat window can do, and skipped the half that it cannot.
Balance Is Not a Reason to Stop
Work-life balance is good. I am in favor of it. But somewhere along the way “balance” got translated into “I will not learn anything unless someone assigns it.”
Learning is not the opposite of balance. It is part of the work, and it belongs inside work hours.[2] The lazy move is never asking for that time, or getting it and spending it on nothing.
What I Am Doing About It
I am moving toward the FDE profile: forward deployed engineer, the person embedded with a customer, working on their actual problem. Two reasons, both boring, both true.
Learning is the job. An FDE meets a new tool, a new constraint, a new mess every week. There is no version of that job where you stop learning and stay good at it. Keeping up stops being homework and becomes the thing you are paid for.
Someone has to own it. When it breaks at the customer, a human has to pick up the phone, explain what happened, and fix it in context. A model can write the patch. It cannot be the one who is responsible. Dave learned this on Monday.
The Simplest Principle
Nothing here is clever. The people who keep trying to keep up are the ones whose jobs stay. The people waiting for the panic to pass are the ones who get surprised.
Conclusion
Dev is not dead. Dev is on the couch, scrolling past an article about dev being dead.[3] Close the tab. Open the docs.