Are AI and developers the world’s best friends or is artificial intelligence a threat to the future of programmers? As artificial intelligence models are becoming increasingly sophisticated, many questions are raised about the future of developers across the industry. Will AI replace programmers entirely, as Eric Schmidt and Dario Amodei are predicting? Will junior developers be facing extinction, as Steve Yegge surmised in a now-famous blog post? Or are we witnessing the dawn of a new era in which technology amplifies human creativity rather than replacing it? I interviewed Nathaniel Okenwa, Developer Evangelist at Twilio, to pick his brains about this question, and his conclusion is that, in the future, software development will undoubtedly remain human-driven even though many changes will occur. The video recording of that interview is available at the end of this blog post.

Developers and AI: the Path to the Future of Coding

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With nearly a decade of hands-on programming experience and a unique perspective on developer community engagement, Nathaniel Okenwa brought both technical depth and strategic insight to this conversation about the evolving landscape of software development.

Spreading the Gospel of Developer Tools

“My parents celebrated when I got that job title of developer evangelist,” Okenwa said. “I speak and meet with developers, online or in person, and I talk about the tools and the technologies they’re using. A part of this job is being with the community and then spreading the good news of Twilio as well.”

<figure class="aligncenter size-large"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">AI and programmers, a love-hate relationship? — image antimuseum.com</figcaption></figure>

For those unfamiliar with the company, “Twilio is a customer engagement platform and one of the providers helping businesses with their customer support, communication tools, and APIs.”

The Junior Developer Dilemma

The elephant in the room for the Tech industry is the fate of junior developers. Steve Yegge’s provocative piece ‘The Death of the Junior Developer’ has sparked intense debate, suggesting that AI won’t make inexperienced developers smarter but will enable experienced programmers to eliminate the need for juniors altogether. A daunting perspective for young programmers.

Nathaniel offers a more nuanced perspective that challenges this binary thinking .

Often, a company doesn’t hire junior developers for their current capabilities. They recruit them because they’re investing in what they will become in the future. Junior developers need to exist if we are going to have mid-level senior developers, developer leaders, and architects at a later time.

Nathaniel is right. Programming isn’t just about syntax and algorithms; it’s about developing problem-solving instincts, understanding business contexts, and learning to translate human needs into technological solutions.

‘If you want to create the next generation of builders, then I don’t think junior developers are going to disappear in the long term. We may forget how important they are for a little bit, but they will definitely make a comeback later on.’

The Eric Schmidt Prophecy: Six Months to Obsolescence?

The urgency of these questions intensified when Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Alphabet, made bold predictions about the timeline for developer displacement. His assertion that developers would be reduced to merely correcting AI output within six months and potentially eliminated entirely within a year sent shivers down the spines of the programming community.

Nathaniel acknowledges the partial truth in Schmidt’s predictions while advocating for a more sophisticated understanding of what developers do. “I think there are elements of truth in it, but I think the situation is a bit more nuanced. AI is, in my mind, another Industrial Revolution. In this context, it means we’ll be looking for repeatable tasks that are extremely simple and how to replace them with technology.”

<figure class="aligncenter size-large"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">AI and developers: programming isn’t just about writing code, it’s about solving business issues — image of a banker in a large banking institution antimuseum.com</figcaption></figure>

The industrial revolution analogy is particularly apt here. Just as mechanisation didn’t eliminate human work but transformed it, AI appears poised to reshape rather than replace programming roles. “I think AI is going to take some aspects of programming and make them so cheap from an effort perspective that it’s not necessarily going to be the best use of people’s time. However, I think developers aren’t just folks that are repeatedly solving minor syntax sentences. They are creative builders coming up with different ways of taking a real-world problem and abstracting it into technology pieces.”

AI and Developers: The Abstraction Ladder

One of the most compelling aspects of Nathaniel’s perspective is his emphasis on abstraction as the key to understanding how AI will transform development work. Rather than replacing developers, AI represents another rung on the abstraction ladder that programmers have been climbing for decades.

Right now, I can use my programming skills to build a website and serve it to millions of people on the Internet. Thirty or forty years ago, I would have needed a whole set of different skills to make that happen. I would have needed so many more hardware skills and so many more specific high-level networking skills. And all of those things have been abstracted away for me to really focus on making this website really fast and performant.

This historical perspective illuminates a pattern that AI-anxious people are missing. Each generation of developers has built upon increasingly sophisticated foundations, allowing them to tackle more complex problems without getting bogged down in lower-level implementation details.

<figure class="aligncenter size-large"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">AI, the printing press and developers. A brilliant analogy by Twilio’s Nathaniel Okenwa — image produced with Midjourney</figcaption></figure>

The printing press analogy further clarifies this progression: “If we think about the printing press, at first you needed to have lots of people who would sit down and handwrite a book in order for you to make 100 copies. The printing press came around, and the amount of effort and skills to achieve that shrunk considerably. But you still needed someone who could run that printing press.”

The Inconvenient Truth: Not Everyone Ascends

However, this progression toward higher abstraction levels raises uncomfortable questions about inclusivity and capability. Not every developer possesses the intellectual agility to continuously climb the abstraction ladder, and there’s value in acknowledging this reality.

Nathaniel addresses this concern with characteristic optimism while maintaining realism. “I suppose there will always be people who remain comfortable doing what they are doing in the ways they are doing it. But with technology making so many more different things available, what’s going to happen is users, customers, and the general public are all going to expect more from our technologies and from us.”

The market forces driving this evolution are relentless. As AI enables higher-quality experiences at scale, customer expectations rise accordingly, creating pressure on all technology providers to evolve or risk irrelevance.

“The folks who aren’t meeting these higher standards of experiences will not be able to deliver the value that their customers and employers are expecting from them. If they don’t continue to meet that bar of expectation that is growing higher and higher, especially as AI helps people to develop new ways of doing this, they will be left behind.”

The Digital Transformation Paradox

This raises an interesting paradox about digital transformation that I