No, your GenAI model isn't going to replace me

Introduction

In the last three weeks, I fixed a couple of performance issues that potentially saved the company a few hundred thousand dollars (I’m a contractor, so I don’t get any bonuses, lol).

How did I find these issues? Call it je ne sais quoi, experience-driven intuition, nerd sixth sense; I just had this gut feeling that something was wrong with the system. In my 20+ years of experience, I have seen plenty of applications, and I knew that this system throughput had a bottleneck somewhere.

I created a test scenario, a way to measure the throughput over time accurately, started a VisualVM instance and combed dozens of threads, stacktraces, memory and CPU snapshots. I found the issues, wrote fixes, and reran everything—boom!!!, more than 10x throughput. My boss and colleagues are happy, and productivity has increased. A “Good Job!“ and the satisfaction of a fulfilled duty.

Remember, technically, these weren’t bugs. All the unit and integration tests passed, BDD tests passed, linters passed, static code analysis passed, and several rounds of code reviews passed. The issues were two unsuspecting lines of code (among thousands) with no evident problems. Thanks to God, the issues were found during the development phase, and no production system was impacted (My colleagues can run their tests faster, so the development speed went up by a lot).

Your Devin/Cursor/DeepSeek/ChatGPT/Claude cannot do what I do.

Just trust me bro, if you give me infinite context window and another 500 Billion USD to burn an a few nuclear reactors and all the copyrighted material in the world (again) we can do it bro, just trust me bro. AGI bro, ASI Bro

No, you can’t. GenAI isn’t the path to AGI if it even happens. You cannot replace my experience, sensitivity, years of knowledge, long nights, experiments, initiative, and everything else that makes me the code monkey I am today.

Your Slop AI Agents have already devoured (and regurgitated) all the technical books, the documentation and every piece of open-source code in the world (illegally, one may suspect) and still cannot replace a developer (not for lack of trying). And the proof is in the pudding; all these Slop AI companies still hire developers.

Bro, GumRoad is no longer hiring junior developers.

Yes, apparently. Also, everyone is complaining about how bad the site is now.

You’re a senior developer; no one says we can replace you. Mark only said that we’re going to replace all the mid-level engineers by 2025

For a minute, I’ll humour Zuckerberg’s idea that he will be able to replace all mid-level engineers by 2025. Then, who will progress to senior engineer? Who is going to review that the slop splurge generator didn’t hallucinate again and FUBAR the entire code base and infrastructure?

We, the current generation of senior developers, are going to retire in the next 20 years, and we’re going to the bank smiling with all the money we’ll make fixing GenAI Slop bugs (and I really, really hope that your slop code vomiter doesn’t cause a tragedy).

Who will replace us if you’re not hiring developers anymore?

Bro, humans make mistakes too.

Yes, but humans get tired; your GenAI can produce garbage code at a speed and efficiency that no human can compete.

Also, humans can learn with some basic feedback; your GenAI knows all the open-source code in the world and still produces manure. Humans need 2400 Calories per day and some caffeine; your GenAI needs nuclear reactors.

Bro, GenAI is like a bicycle; it makes you go fast, be more productive

What a horrible analogy.

My bicycle is my computer; I’m in complete control. It goes as fast as I want, and I get fitter when I use it. GenAI is like a rusty rollercoaster, it may go fast, but is going to kill us at some point.

And no, it isn’t making developers more productive; it is making them worse and dependent on slop generators. Just read r/ChatGPTCoding and despair.

Just don’t use it bro.

I don’t use it, but GenAI is affecting society as a whole as well.

More sophisticated scams, more fake news, fake historical photos, worse litigation, more loneliness, people aren’t reading, people are not writing, artists are losing their jobs. Is a disaster

Take your copium tank, old man. GenAI is the future and will replace you anyway.

I concede you this one; you’re right. You Slop peddlers are pushing very hard your Slop Machines to the CEOs so they can replace us.

And I totally get it; we, IT workers as a class, are annoying. I worked as a team lead, and I have hired developers. Dealing with developers sucks. We’re rude and weird; some do not shower; we are eccentric, maybe on the spectrum; we are always late, always complain about meetings, charge a lot of money, and then leave the company on a whimper. I get it. Our heads were the first ones on the chopping board.

But you’re going to regret it. The quality of your product is going to suffer, and your clients are going to leave.

My advice for young developers

Stop, right now, cold turkey. You don’t need AI tools; your brain is beautiful, a gift from God; use it, train it.

Write your own code; it's simple, easy, and fun. Generations before you did it. GenAI or AGI (if it happens) will not have what you have: the human experience.

GenAI can write (bad) code faster than you, so what?

Over the years, we have developed high-level languages, libraries, patterns, and techniques… because we don’t want to write too much code. We have physical limitations, get tired, and sometimes forget things, so we develop the right abstractions. A machine that doesn’t get tired of writing (bad) code will not build anything similar (given that AGI can have initiative and true creativity).

Use your humanity, your God-given birthright. Use your brain. Write code, write poems and stories (even if no one reads them), write posts, read books, go outside, touch grass.

You don’t need to pay to these peddlers; your brain is more powerful than any GenAI copyright infringement machine.