AI Coding Assistants: Will They Take My Job? (Spoilers inside)

A candid look at Copilot, Cursor, and the future of human developers. Are we doomed?

AICoding

“AI will replace programmers in 5 years.” - Some CEO on LinkedIn who hasn’t written code since 1999.

“AI is just fancy autocomplete.” - A senior engineer who refuses to use anything but Vim.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle.

My Experience with the Robots

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot and Cursor for a while now. And I have to admit: it’s addictive.

It’s like having a zealous intern sitting next to you. Sometimes they suggest brilliant solutions you hadn’t thought of. Sometimes they suggest importing a library that doesn’t exist.

The Good

  • Boilerplate is dead. I haven’t written a full HTML boilerplate or a regex pattern in months.
  • Learning new tech. “Hey AI, how do I center a div in Tailwind?” (Just kidding, nobody knows how to center a div).

The Bad

  • Confidence. AI is extremely confident, even when it’s dead wrong. It will hallucinations a function called calculate_universe_meaning() and look you in the eye while doing it.
  • The “Context” Trap. You paste a 500-line file and ask for a fix. The AI hallucinates because it forgot line 12 by the time it got to line 400.

So, is your job safe?

If your job is “copy-pasting from StackOverflow,” then yes, you should be worried. AI does that faster than you.

But if your job is:

  1. Understanding complex business requirements.
  2. Debugging why the production database is on fire.
  3. Negotiating with the Product Manager about why we can’t “just add blockchain.”

Then you’re fine.

Conclusion

AI is a tool. like a compiler or an IDE. It makes you faster. It makes you more powerful.

But it doesn’t make you a software engineer. That part is still on you.

Embrace the tools, but don’t forget how to actually write code. Because when the servers go down and the AI is offline, you’re the one on call.