Imagine you meet a few developer friends after work. You grab a table at a bar, the first round arrives, and within about ninety seconds the conversation drifts to... AI. It always does these days! AI is in every keynote, every group chat, every standup, and all over social media. It feels like the only thing any of us can talk about.
And for good reason. It has genuinely changed the way we work, and got all of us asking the same questions:
What does this mean for me? How do I keep up? Should I lean into it, or hold out a little longer? Is it even safe? If I don't code anymore... what exactly do I do?
And sitting underneath all of those smaller questions, quietly, is the big one:
Will AI take my job?
Heck, perhaps some of you have already been directly affected by AI in some capacity.
It's something that worries me just as much as it worries you, so let me share where I've landed and how I see it. But first, a little bit of nostalgia.
I Was a Webmaster
Decades ago, I was a webmaster. Show of hands: how many of you even remember that word?
At the turn of the millennium, the webmaster was simply the person who made the website. Not just the frontend, or just the backend: the website. One human being, start to finish. And that was possible because, back then, the web was a much smaller, much simpler creature.
Put something together in Photoshop, slice the design into images, conjure up HTML in Dreamweaver, and off you go! FTP those files to a shared hosting account and you're done.
I started toying around with websites when I got my first computer, in 2000. I still remember the first time I clicked that mysterious button in Internet Explorer 6. "Edit in Microsoft FrontPage," the tooltip said. One click later, a clone of that page was sitting there, editable, right in front of me. And in another tab... the source code: HTML packed with tables and hacks.
Before I really understood what was happening, I was building sites for other people and getting paid for it. Not much, but who could ask for more? Building web stuff and getting paid, awesome!
The stack I worked with would be unrecognizable today. I fought to make my pages behave in Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8. I built Flash intros and Flash sites (sorry, that was the trend). And when a project needed a little more muscle, I'd reach for WordPress and just enough PHP to make things dynamic and editable by the client.
All that made me a webmaster. Clunky title, I know, but that was the word.
Now, do me a favor. Open a job board today and search for "webmaster." Not a single posting, right? Sad. What happened?
The Day Webmasters Were Gone
At this point you're probably thinking:
Sure, Nico, webmaster is a fossil of a word, and you, my friend, are old. Nobody calls a web developer a webmaster anymore.
And... you're right! That's exactly my point.
Did the webmasters go extinct? Did a meteor streak across the sky one Tuesday and wipe them and their Flash sites off the face of the Earth?
Of course not. We evolved. Most of us are still around, just wearing different names on our LinkedIn profiles. We changed because the web changed, and it changed fast. All of a sudden, the simple HTML with its cute <marquee> tags didn't cut it anymore, and there was no jQuery plugin to save us. Frameworks showed up and multiplied: Angular, then React, then Vue. JavaScript climbed out of the browser and onto the server with Node, and from there the toolbox just kept growing, from Webpack to Vite and from CoffeeScript to modern TypeScript. We can look back with nostalgia. The takeaway is obvious: things change.
And I had to learn every part of it as it arrived, whether I wanted to or not. I resented plenty of it at first. If in 2014 you were fast and happy with jQuery, Backbone, and Marionette, and someone parachuted you onto an Angular project, believe me, you felt the whiplash. "Come on, why?" But that resistance, that little wall of I don't want to learn a new thing right now, is a wall you learn to climb over again and again, because the alternative is standing still while the industry walks off without you. That's just the nature of the game.
So the single title splintered into many: backend developer, frontend developer, DevOps, QA. Of course, some webmasters closed the laptop and went off to open a beach bar. But a huge number of us simply adapted, and I'm one of them. I'm a full-stack developer today, I was a webmaster yesterday, and I've been doing this for more than fifteen years. Twenty-six, really, if you count back to that fifteen-year-old kid poking around in FrontPage in 2000.
And it will keep going. The tools will keep shifting under our feet, because that is the one constant of this whole industry. Technology evolves, and we evolve with it, or we don't get to keep playing.
Which Brings Us Back to AI
So here's theHere's the thing I most want you to carry away from this article, the single sentence I'd tattoo across this whole conversation if I could:
AI is here to shake up the market and rewrite how we work, but it will not take your place if you evolve.
That's the entire message. Evolve, and you stay in the game.
Yes, the name of your role will most likely change. Will you become an "AI Coding Agent Wrangler" or a "Vibe Engineer"? I wouldn't mind a business card that says "Clanker Babysitter" or "Coding Robo-Army Admiral." We've all seen the crazy titles and silly job descriptions floating around. Take them with a grain of salt.
Because at the end of the day, what matters is what you actually bring to the table when it comes to solving a problem. And that was never just typing code.
You Were Never Just a Coder
Tell me if you've heard, or even felt, this:
AI is robbing me of the joy of coding.
I hear you. I kind of feel the same.
I love writing code by hand, fussing over the shape of a function, crafting good-looking functions. Hey, I even enjoyed the tabs vs. spaces and semicolons vs. no semicolons wars!
For me, coding was never a chore. It's the fun part, a little puzzle I'm genuinely happy to sit inside for an afternoon. And now here comes this new reality where you open your editor, paste in a spec, and watch an agent spit out in thirty seconds the code you would've lovingly typed out over the next hour. If that stings a little, if it feels like something you enjoyed is being taken away, you're not wrong and you're not alone. Some mornings it gets me too.
But your job, your real job as an engineer and a problem-solver, was never just the act of typing characters into a file. Coding was a part of it, often the most enjoyable part, but never the whole of it. Zoom out and the actual work has always looked more like this:
- Research: Figuring out what's possible and what others have already solved.
- Planning and specs: Deciding what problem we're truly here to fix, and for whom.
- Coding: Turning all of that thinking into real, running source code. The fun part, I'll happily admit.
- Code review: Reading your teammates' pull requests, following the open PRs on an open source project, and judging what's ready to ship.
- Testing: Writing an automated test suite, or clicking through the app by hand until you trust it.
- Documentation: The one we all mumble past ("yeah... the docs are pending, but it works").
We did all six, but let's be honest about the balance: we poured most of our hours into that third bullet and sprinted through the rest. And that ratio is precisely what AI is rearranging.
This isn't the end of writing code. We'll still write plenty. But if before you spent, say, 70% of the week producing code and 30% on everything around it, the new you may find that balance flipping on its head. Less time typing code, more time reading and reviewing the code an agent produced while you were busy elsewhere.
And reviewing is the step where I watch a lot of people quietly fumble the whole thing.
A Recipe for Disaster
Some developers have started letting the agent write the code and then merging it without ever really reading it. That's the vibe coding mantra, right?
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding," where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. (Andrej Karpathy, Feb. 2025)
In that famous tweet, Karpathy says vibe coding isn't too bad for throwaway weekend projects. Fast forward to today, and you have companies shipping vibe-coded PRs into production like there's no tomorrow.
That's a mistake, and a costly one.
Think about what you're actually doing when you build software. You're solving a real problem for real people. So when something breaks at the worst possible moment, the agent is not the one who gets the phone call. The agent doesn't lose sleep, doesn't answer to the client, and doesn't carry the responsibility. You do.
When your customer loads the page and gets a big, ugly 500 error, "Sorry, perhaps Claude merged a PR with a bug" is not a sentence that will save you. You're still the one who has to take responsibility, fix the problem, and explain what went wrong. By all means, use AI to help you fix it, but understand that the accountability never left your desk and never will.
So don't skip the review. Read what the agent produced with the same care you'd give a coworker's pull request, the same care you brought the first time you inherited a stranger's codebase and had to understand it before you dared touch it. You already own this skill. Nothing new is being asked of you here except a shift in where your hours go: a little less typing into a blank file, a lot more reading with a critical eye.
That shift is the whole point, and leaning into it is what turns AI from a rival into an ally. Meet it there, and it stops being the thing coming for your job and becomes the thing that helps you get to the finish line faster.
So What's Next?
It doesn't matter whether you're the nervous friend at the bar who suspects AI is coming for everything, or the one who's already automated half of their week away. The move in front of you is the same one webmasters had to make twenty years ago: pick up the new tools, figure out how to make them work for you, and evolve.
Because no, AI is not going to take your job. But refusing to learn it just might leave you a step slower than the developer sitting at the next desk, someone no more talented than you who simply embraced the power-up.
Now, I have to go. A client asked for a Flash intro. Until next time!
