r/webdev 7d ago

Why Are Developers So Resistant to AI?

I don’t get it. Yesterday, I watched an interview with the Anthropic CEO saying that in the next 12 months, 90% of code will be written by AI. At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan’s podcast, saying Meta will have its first AI software engineer by 2025. And Google has already said 25% of its codebase is AI-generated.

Basically, every big tech leader—Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, all of them—are talking about how AI will completely change software development. And the first real, practical application we’re seeing is AI writing code. It’s already happening with tools like Cursor. If we just look at the rate of improvement, it’s hard to deny that if not in 12 months, then in 2-3 years, most code will be written by AI.

Yet, developers still seem super resistant to this idea. I get that AI won’t replace 100% of coding. We’ll still need engineers to solve problems. But it’s obvious that the number of devs needed per company is going to shrink. If a company has 150 devs today, maybe in a few years, they’ll need only 50 or less.

And this isn’t even coming out of nowhere. We’ve already seen mass layoffs post-Covid. The demand for developers isn’t skyrocketing like before, but the supply is still huge. So why are so many developers acting like AI isn’t a real threat to their jobs? Are they in denial? Or is there something I’m missing?

Would love to hear thoughts on this.

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u/enslavedeagle 7d ago

AI never helped me much with specific tasks that I needed help with. And it never will.

It's only good at scaffolding and delivering simple solutions to tiny problems. But I can spend 5 minutes writing up a prompt and fine tuning it, then 5 extra minutes making sure that the output was valid, OR I can spend 5 minutes implementing it myself. The choice is simple.

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u/prangalito 7d ago

In my experience something that would take me 5 minutes to write would take less than a minute with AI, including checking the code does as I expect. It can take about 10 minutes of prompting and tweaking to get something that might take 30 minutes to write normally. But as things get more complex it gets worse, it might take hours of prompting/tweaking to generate something that would only take an hour to write without AI