“AI will definitely (not) take your job”

AI will not take your job—this is probably what many developers want to hear these days. So, when a keynote speech at a developer conference has that title, you obviously want to hear more.

Especially when the speaker is Kitze, a developer, indie hacker, and serial entrepreneur notorious for dropping truth bombs in his keynote speeches at conferences. And it doesn’t take long to realize—he completely and absolutely doesn’t mean it.

The sooner you admit it, the better

Kitze is, in fact, certain AI will (and should!) take developers’ jobs, and software engineers refusing to accept the fact are in denial, blinded by their own ego and feelings of entitlement.

He predicted it and wrote an article about it four years ago, before LLMs were a thing and AI was an overused and overhyped word.

AI will not only take over coding, but it will also do it better than humans.
How could it not?! It has all the code in the world available for learning, and it’s productive 24 hours a day.

That is much more than 3 hours of productivity a day for human developers, who spend the rest of their working days sharing memes on Slack and nitpicking in code reviews.
The sooner we admit it, the better!

The next natural step in programming

Asked if he based his firm opinion on some industry insights or research, Kitze answers that the shift is obvious. We just need to look at the history of humanity and tech and how everything has evolved:

Developers desperately want the innovation to stop here so they can keep their cushy jobs for the next 50 years.

But what they want actually doesn’t matter. This is the next natural step in programming, and it’s going to happen whether people like it or not.

And he’s not saying from a biased perspective like some founders of AI coding tools:

I don’t have an AI product to sell to people. I have barely implemented any AI features in my products, even though I could’ve jumped on the hype train and made my main product, Benji, revolve around AI.

AI engineers work to replace themselves

So, how should developers approach this fundamental shift in their professional lives? Should they give up and switch careers? Should they become prompt engineers? Kitze firmly says:

Calling yourself a prompt engineer is dumb.

He advises embracing AI tools and using all the AI tools all the time and stop doing mundane things manually:

It blows my mind that some devs are still resisting this.

I’ve been using Copilot for a long time; then I switched to Supermaven because it’s faster. I cannot even code on airplanes anymore because it feels so slow and ancient.

I’ve been paying for ChatGPT since the beginning. I’m using Claude 3.5 Sonnet and artefacts for prototyping new products or product features. I’m experimenting with switching to Cursor (AI-based IDE) just because it seems that I can do things way faster using AI instead of manually coding everything. 

When it comes to how much time and effort developers should invest in learning about machine learning, LLMs, and how AI works under the hood, Kitze admits it’s a tricky question:

For indie hackers and developers who are working on their own products, this doesn’t matter that much. But for developers who want to keep having a job and students who are still in university and want to choose a path, they should really go all in on this.

I think the safest career path will be an AI engineer because they will be the last ones to be replaced—ironically, by themselves.

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