It’s about leverage, not replacement
The dream has always been to replace software developers.
It is an obsession.
We have been trying since 1969.
Margaret Hamilton and her team proved software could be mission-critical.
But this success revealed a problem.
Software required intense focus.
It was expensive.
It took too much time.
Business leaders hated the slowness.
So, the cycle began.
- Attempt 1: COBOL
The pitch: "Common Business-Oriented Language".
The promise: Make the syntax look like English.
Then business analysts could write their own programs.
No more specialized programmers needed.
The result?
It didn’t replace developers.
It just created a new job: COBOL developers.
Readable syntax did not fix the logic problem.
- Attempt 2: Visual Basic
Decades later, tools like Visual Basic arrived.
The promise: Drag, drop, done.
It lowered the barrier to entry.
It was fun.
But it couldn't pull the trigger.
Simple apps were easy.
But when complexity grew, the tools buckled.
Organizations still needed experts for security and performance.
Developers survived again.
- The Current Attempt: AI
Now we are calling in the big guns.
AI coding assistants.
They generate code from plain language.
The excitement is back.
But there is a catch.
Typing speed isn't the bottleneck.
Thinking is.
Abraham Lincoln said, "If I had four hours to cut a tree, I’d spend three sharpening my axe."
Development is the sharpening.
It is the invisible reasoning about complexity.
AI generates code, but someone must check if it solves the business problem.
- The Verdict
We keep trying to solve a mechanical problem.
But software is an intellectual problem.
Software is just thinking made tangible.
You cannot automate the thinking.
To kill the developer, you must automate human judgment.
Each failed attempt to replace them actually helped them.
They got better tools.
They got more leverage.
The dream of replacement will continue.
But as long as the world needs complex thinking, there will be developers.
The question isn't "Will AI replace them?".
The question is: "What will they build with this new leverage?"