Every few months somebody asks us, usually a client, sometimes a candidate interviewing for an engineering role, whether AI is going to replace developers. It's a fair question. We use AI tools every day at NodeGroove, across client systems and our own products, and the honest answer is: AI has already taken over a large part of the job. Just not the part most people think.
The part it has taken over is typing. Boilerplate, first drafts of a component, a repetitive data migration script, a test file nobody wanted to write by hand, a first pass at matching an existing codebase's style. That work used to eat hours. Now it takes minutes, and an engineer reviews it instead of producing it line by line.
What AI has not taken over, and what we don't think it will, is judgment. Somebody still has to decide that a vehicle can't leave a weighbridge without a matching tare and gross reading. Somebody still has to decide what happens when a school bursar reverses a payment after a receipt has already gone out by SMS. Those aren't coding problems. They're decisions about how a real business should behave when the inputs are messy, and they require understanding the client's operation well enough to know which edge case actually matters and which one is noise.
That's the shift we've seen on our own team. Engineers spend less time producing code and more time specifying it, reviewing it, and owning the consequences of what ships. The skill that matters most hasn't become prompting. It's still the same skill it always was: understanding a domain well enough to know what the software is supposed to do before a single line gets written, AI-generated or otherwise.
So no, we don't think AI is taking over from developers. We think it's taking over the parts of the job that were never really the point.
“AI hasn't replaced a single engineer on our team. It's replaced the slow parts of being one, so we spend more time on the part no model can do: deciding what the system should actually do for the person using it.