If you’re a developer and you hate AI, you’re probably an idiot. It’s not your fault, maybe your dad dropped you or something. AI is smarter than you, and it always will be.
It’s 1800 and the Industrial Revolution is in full swing. A factory that produces metal sheets has just introduced the new Sheet Cutter 5000, a never-before-seen machine that you pass the metal into and it cuts it for you. No longer do people need to break their backs cutting these sheets by hand. “But, but… Boss. I like breaking my back, reducing my life span and cutting the sheets by hand”. What do you think the factory owner is going to do with that person? If they’re not willing to get with the times, I’m sure there are 100 less skilled individuals who would happily take their place. If you hate AI, you are this employee, and your time is running out.
It is fundamentally unproductive for you to hate AI. It will only take your job if you let it. Opposing and creating friction is a sure way of making that happen.
“AI produces worse work!”
Only if you let it. If you use AI to write code, but then peer-review it to the standards you would hold yourself to, then the bad code will never make it into production. Only when you drop the ball, get lazy and stop holding AI to high standards is when it will create slop.
“AI will take our jobs.”
I doubt it in the long run. Someone still needs to steer the AI. You’ve just unlocked a superpower. You can now work 5x faster and to a higher standard; use that to ship better work. In the before times, you would compromise X or Y to have Z, but now you can have it all! You can have that complicated feature and the nice button animations. You can implement backwards compatibility for this and still have time to make it work for that. Sure, there are layoffs, but that was a growing trend before AI. There was an oversupply of developers long before AI. But AI will bring new opportunities. New startups, new business opportunities, new industries. And with all those, will come new jobs. Developers becoming 5x more productive doesn't mean that the companies need 1/5th the staff. They will just be 5x hungrier, expect 5x more features and 5x more polish. The standards across the board, for every developer in every field, will increase. When anyone can now vibecode an app with Lovable, it is up to us as developers to increase the gap by showing our years of experience can help us guide the AI to create better outcomes than a non-developer.
"My privacy is at risk."
Your privacy was gone long ago. If not by the government, then by Google or another tech giant. You think you're safe because you use the Brave browser or a VPN, but it doesn't matter. Every site you sign up to is all sharing its data back up to big tech through analytics and tracking. You haven't had privacy for the last 10 years.
Your job has changed. You’re not a programmer anymore, and you never will be again. You’re now a solutions architect. Your job is not to tackle how the app will work on a bigger picture, not the finer details. It’s not your job to write SQL queries or validate POST data anymore. Instead, how does the data flow through the app? What features are most useful to the user? How do we best upsell a customer? This is your job now and if you don’t like it, you need to change career.
The days of handwritten code are long gone. You can convince yourself “in 5 years, they will be paying us so much money to clean up this AI mess”, but I disagree. Maybe some companies that jumped the gun and are fully vibe coding will have that problem. But if you are treating AI like a pair-programming partner, sanity-checking, peer-reviewing, and testing everything it creates, then you’ll come out of this ahead.
Don’t be stupid; AI is awesome, and if you’re a developer boycotting it you’re just committing career suicide.