AI Won’t Replace Engineers - It’ll Expose Them

Every few weeks the same prophecy echoes across LinkedIn: “AI is going to replace engineers.”

Let’s be clear: AI doesn’t replace engineers - it reveals them.

It’s like flipping on the fluorescent lights in a dingy kitchen at 3 a.m. You don’t create the roaches; you just see what was already there.

Good engineers? AI is nitrous oxide.

• They cut through boilerplate, unblock themselves faster, and spark new ideas.
• They can spot when an answer is half-baked because they understand the system underneath.
• They treat AI like an accelerant, not a crutch.

Bad engineers? AI is a megaphone for mediocrity.

• They ship spaghetti code faster.
• They confuse autocomplete for comprehension.
• They flood pull requests with fragile scaffolding they can’t debug.

This isn’t about productivity - it’s about comprehension.

And here’s the part we don’t like to admit: a lot of engineers were already sleepwalking through their careers. Copy-pasting Stack Overflow answers, hiding behind Jira tickets, hoping nobody asked the hard questions. AI didn’t break them. AI just turned the lights on.

But here’s where bell hooks’ voice reminds us: judgment without love is cruelty. Not everyone had a mentor who slowed down to explain recursion. Not everyone grew up with a machine in their bedroom at age 12. Not everyone had the safety net to learn by breaking things.

AI has the potential to democratize that access. It can whisper back answers at 2 a.m. when no one else is there to help. It can give the timid junior the courage to try. It can free the overworked parent to still grow without burning out.

The difference, though, is what you do with that power.

Steven Pressfield calls it “Resistance” - the invisible force that keeps us from sitting down, from practicing scales, from digging into fundamentals. AI can either reinforce Resistance (“I’ll let the machine do it for me”) or help you fight it (“I’ll use the machine to go further, faster, deeper”).

That’s the fork in the road.

So the real question isn’t “Will AI take my job?”
It’s “When AI strips away the busywork, do I have the depth to matter?”

The choice is still yours. AI is a mirror, not a replacement. It reflects back the craft, discipline, and hunger you bring to the work.

And if you don’t like what you see in that mirror - now’s the time to change it.