Kevin Surace argues developers have always handed off lower-level work to tools, from assembly to high-level languages. What matters to stakeholders is speed and delivery, not how the code gets written. AI doesn't replace developers; it lets them focus on higher-level problems instead of typing.
Most developers think AI is the threat, but this expert revealed why they've got it completely backwards. Early coders were coding in a language that went away because we had a higher-level language called assembly. And then assembly basically went away for most people, and that became these higher-level languages. And of course, by the '70s and '80s, we had very high-level languages. So we have seen developers move to higher and higher and higher-level languages where the language is producing, you know, thousands of lines of machine code for us. Here's what I would say in talking to so many developers. At first, the developer has sadness and says, all of my joy comes from or came from writing code, and I love writing code. And so my supposition here is that you never really loved writing code. Actually, what you got the most joy from is delivering that feature or that bug fix or whatever. And notice the person you were delivering that to never cared how you got there. What they cared about is, did you do it right? Was it on time or was it even speedier? So So they wanted speed and quality, speed and quality. Nobody cares how you got there. And in fact, if you can get there without writing a line of code, even better.
