When Developer Is No Longer a Profession? | ✉️ #79
Hey! 👋
Every few decades, technology kills a profession. Typists, switchboard operators, travel agents… all replaced by interfaces that made their skills unnecessary. And it’s happening again — but this time, to software developers. With the arrival of tools like Claude’s Opus model and UI-based app builders, anyone can now build complex applications without writing a single line of code. The walls around software creation are falling.
Developers once held a kind of monopoly on creation — they were the gatekeepers between an idea and a product. But today, an AI can generate an entire backend, design the frontend, connect APIs, and deploy the infrastructure, all in minutes. The human role shifts from writing code to simply describing intent. And description, unlike programming, is a universal skill.
It’s not that programming will disappear, but “being a developer” will. Just like photographers didn’t vanish when smartphones appeared — they evolved into curators, storytellers, and creators of meaning. The new generation of tech workers won’t code; they’ll orchestrate AIs, define logic, and refine outcomes. They’ll be directors, not builders.
In one or two years, maybe companies won’t hire developers — they’ll hire prompt engineers, AI supervisors, or system composers. The code will still exist, but nobody will touch it. The real question isn’t if developers will disappear as a profession, but how fast we’ll stop noticing they already have.
What We've Shared
- AI Literacy, Humans In The Loop and Machine Learning Evaluation: an excerpt from the latest episode of DevOps Accents with Leo and Paul Larsen.
What We've Discovered
Amazon CloudWatch launches Cross-Account and Cross-Region Log Centralization: We somehow assumed that’s already there since less recent available or centralized multi account monitoring support, but seems like it was only for metrics. Now it’s almost perfect!
Don’t Build Multi-Agents: Good tips on building agents and why trying to run many agents in parallel is often a dead end.
Terraform Optimization Guide: This is a rare case of truly in-depth low-level optimisations you can do to your Terraform setup, especially in scenarios where you are struck with an enormous mono-repo setup.
Why I Ditched Docker for Podman: While we have a whole Dockerless course, it's worth reminding, that containers have and follow standards and as of 2025, it doesn't matter which tool you use locally. And when it comes to production, there should be neither Podman nor Docker.
CloudFlare Radar AI Insights: Never knew Radar exists before - glad we do now, and this new AI Insights are really cool to analyze.
The 80th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, October 31st. See you next time!