Robin Mai - Software Developer & AI Enthusiast

Maybe. But not in the way most people think.

The Evergreen: "Developers Will Become Obsolete"

This prophecy is as old as the industry itself: High-level languages were supposed to make assembly developers obsolete. CASE Tools & UML were supposed to let us "click together" software. Low-Code / No-Code was supposed to enable business apps without developers. And now AI.

What we've actually experienced: The problem domain has been elevated to an increasingly abstract level.

Technology as Commodity

Today I no longer need to know in detail how a transistor, a compiler, or the Java Virtual Machine works internally. The technology became so good that it became commodity: it's there, I rarely need to engage with it deeply, most of the time it just works.

The New Reality: Systems Thinking

What I experience instead: Systems thinking has gained enormous relevance. The complexity of the overall solution has exploded – across multiple disciplines:

Development – Code is just one aspect
Operations – Reliability, Observability, Incident Response
UX / Design – User-centered thinking
Security & Compliance – Data protection, regulation
Product Management – Prioritization, roadmap
FinOps – Costs, vendor risks, data quality

Developers today often find themselves in hybrid roles that can barely fit into one head. Precisely because of this, the bottleneck is shifting: not "writing code", but making decisions.

What Really Hurts Today

It's rarely the syntax. It's the hard questions:

What is the problem really?
Which trade-offs do we accept?
How do we validate properly? – Tests, monitoring, incident learning
How do we keep the system maintainable? – Ownership, interfaces, data flows
Who takes responsibility when something goes wrong?

So Will AI Replace Software Developers?

In the classical definition? This role is already dead in many places. "Software development" has long been a socio-technical system: people, processes, risks, user behavior, operations, organization.

As a Product Developer or System Developer, I still see excellent future prospects. AI will be a turbo there: it makes people faster and more effective – but it doesn't take away their responsibility for goals, trade-offs, and system architecture.

My Thesis

AI doesn't replace developers. It replaces the part of development that we mistakenly consider "the job".