If you look at the plethora of AI articles of late, you may think that everyone falls into one of two camps: The haters that abstain from it altogether, deeming it a waste of resources and a harbinger of doom; and the evangelists who use it to manage all the minutiae of their lives. But most of us, I suspect, fall into that “messy middle”: we’re trying to figure out the best, most efficient way of using AI to help us with our jobs and lives, while simultaneously worrying that AI will make our jobs completely obsolete.
That’s the space I’m currently in. AI has been a tremendous boon to my productivity. With it, I’ve been able to complete tasks faster, more thoroughly, and with more secure code than before. It’s helped me find issues in my work before those issues have made it to production. It’s taken the heavy-lifting out of large projects, and taken the “busy” work off my hands; the rote code that doesn’t fit easily into a library, yet is just repetitive enough to be written without much brainpower. But it’s also left me wondering if there’s a place for the independent developer in this brave new AI-powered world.
Shielding Us from the Overwhelm
I suspect that I probably have some degree of undiagnosed ADHD (something that I think may be more prevalent among Gen X’ers in tech than we can ever truly know). I often find large tasks overwhelming. Where to start? How to approach? Is this something that I can even do? When there is too much to do, my mind often wants to shut it out and pretend it’s not there, and that’s not very helpful when there are deadlines to be met.
AI has certainly helped in that regard. It has helped me take large-scale projects and break them down into more manageable chunks. Let it take the first steps. It won’t get everything right (there’s been enough written on that point that I don’t have to regurgitate it here), but if it can reduce a large problem into smaller, more approachable pieces, then that is certainly a value add.
A Junior Dev at My Fingertips
Here’s where I’m going to stoke some controversy. AI has been more than a decent junior developer for me. As a single-person business who lives project-to-project, I’m never going to be able to afford to hire a junior developer on staff; it’s just not going to happen. But having AI as a coding assistant has been the next best thing.
Sometimes the coding in front of you is a problem you’ve already solved. A repeatable slider paradigm that doesn’t add all the bloat WordPress carousel plugins usually come with? I have that down, but it’s not something I can just drop into a site without customization. So I point Claude Code at my prior work and it takes it from there.
And while I could teach a junior developer my technique, they may implement it the way I want, or not. They may have their own solution which I would have to reverse-engineer if a client needed support, and the junior dev was no longer around to assist.
With AI, I can teach that as a skill and know it’s repeatable. Not the same every time, but configured to the needs of that project using the same foundational patterns that have been well-established.
It’s a knife that cuts both ways. If my capacity has increased because I can hand off tasks to a coding agent, what’s stopping the agencies I do work for from doing the same? Am I now less relevant to them, less useful, because they can have AI do the work that they used to hand me, often using the same code I wrote from them on prior projects? Have I coded myself into obsolescence?
No Hiding the Math
These days, the word “responsibly” has to do a lot of work. There are certainly a lot of ethical concerns that go into using AI. But for me, the ability to help solve problems, and the ability to apply solutions to problems I’ve already solved with my meager, organic brain, is where I’ve landed on that. I don’t ask AI to do anything I couldn’t do on my own, and it’s not deciding what to build or why; that’s still my call, the same way it would be if a junior dev turned in a first pass. And I don’t obscure what it’s doing from the people paying me. My contracts disclose where AI is part of the process (and, in full disclosure, I used AI to review drafts of this very post), and clients are billed for my time, not for the hours AI happened to save me. As AI becomes part of the process for more and more agencies both large and small, then transparency must come with it.
Taking the Middle Path
AI will continue to have its vehement opponents and its die-hard fanatics, but most of us will keep walking that knife’s edge, trying to use it responsibly without getting swallowed up by it.
As for whether I’ve coded myself into obsolescence, maybe not yet, but as my business approaches its ten-year anniversary, I’m certainly watching where the wind is blowing, and getting ready to pivot if necessary. The agencies I work with still need someone who knows which fifteen-year-old WordPress hook is about to break their site, who can tell them why a solution is wrong before it ships, not just generate one that loads, and who knows to look at the color combinations the designer used for accessibility issues.
AI hasn’t replaced that judgment; it’s just given me more hours in the day to apply it. Whether that stays true in the coming years is hard to know. But I’d rather spend this messy middle getting good at working alongside the thing than pretending I can outlast it by ignoring it.