AI Coding tools made everything easier, except the hard part

As software developers, we used to hide behind code. It's one of the bigger things AI took from us.

A developer's job is usually difficult, from a cognitive perspective. You have to think, to keep entire systems and workflows in your head, to make sense of ambiguous requirements and to "see in the future", by predicting issues before they happen. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's the hardest job or that all developers go that far, but even the haters have to admit it's among the cognitively demanding jobs. And sometimes we were able to hide behind the code.

Speaking as someone focused on the frontend, I was able to take a breather while doing some CSS fiddling. I was perhaps delaying the hard task waiting around the corner, but still doing work, still being productive. And I was doing something creative, without a huge toll on my brainpower. My mind was free to wander and rest in the background. Weirdly, in my experience, one of the best ways of dealing with hard software problems is not to think about them for a while. The answer will come on its own, when you least expect it, perhaps during a walk or a shower.

So sometimes code was the shield that we hid behind when we needed a break but couldn't afford to stop. Easier code when you're tired, harder code when your strength is back.

Now, with AI coding tools, all the easy, low-effort work on the code is gone. Poof! All that's left is the hard work. Thinking about which decisions are best. Thinking about caveats. Thinking about the client's actual needs. Thinking about the specs and requirements. Thinking about the estimates, timelines and deadlines. Thinking through the bugs. Thinking while reviewing code. Thinking. A lot of thinking. And that's hard.

I don't know... It's funny, I think, how something that should have made things easier for us also made them harder.

To be fair, AI tools actually do make some things easier: learning, improving, experimenting. But all of them require thinking.

They say AI lives in the cloud. I don't think that's a cloud, that's smoke coming from the developers' brains.