As software engineers, it appears as a potent threat to profession for many, yet there are people who are using it well to augment their own deliveries, and despite that AI on it’s own doesn’t bring the economic value and benfits as having a seasoned professional on the team…
This one observation had been striking my head a lot lately, what is the next avenue for passionate devs like me, is it end, or the beginning of a new career from scratch, or this is an entire new way of doing the same thing at scale / methods we never imagined?
As of today, my opinion after watching tools like codex, claude code, openclaw, models like opus, sonnet, gpt, codex, etc, all of them suffer one pain – Debugging takes more tokens than coding it.
And this means super expensive bills, without assurity of resolution and avoiding those errors in future.
This is where a sesoned dev changes the picture, the Jira Tickets, the sprint plans, docs, Tech Design Docs, and team distribution, all of them working cheaper per token (:P) for the assurity that they won’t redo their work multiple times.
And at the same time, more seasoned means more errors observed and bigger context to catch mistakes in advance, this is where the value of a seasoned developer starts to outshine the costs that come with it.
So Devs, feel free to use AI where you can, just keep secrets in your own pocket, and god bless these models to run years of experience in context memory to even try to match the vision we carry to development with us in every sprint, maybe then it will become a full fledge developer on its own (Architect, that will need more time and work hehe!)
Moral of the story – Its a fantastic tool, that struggles same as us on long debugging sessions, just struggles as the stack calls go deep beyond context boundaries.
Disclaimer – Above Rant is a result of me trying to point same error 3 times, and ending up reviewing the code and telling AI to add a simple null check!
EDIT: It was my mistake, I missed updating the UI builds on live app system 🥶 🥶 🥶 But AI still hardened its code, classic imposter syndrome trait even in LLM xD