The hype of AI is at its peak. Scroll through LinkedIn and Medium and you will see “vibe coders” claiming that programming is dead. Startups pitch to investors on products that were “built entirely with AI.” Companies whisper in boardrooms that developers are replaceable, cutting cost and time. The hype has twisted the industry’s perception on AI. It is seen less as a tool and more as a replacement.
That’s not just wrong, it’s dangerous.
The Illusion of AI as a Replacement
Hollywood might be the first one to plant the seed in our heads that AI will one day take over us. We are not there yet, but AI can spit out code, debug snippets, or scaffold an app faster than a junior and even a senior developer. On the surface, it looks like a replacement. But here’s the catch: generating code is not the same as building, maintaining a product and making critical decisions.
Real software development is more than writing lines of neat code. It’s:
