SixAIcodingmythsIamdonehearing
If you keep saying these out loud at meetups, the senior engineers nearby are quietly rolling their eyes.
1. "AI replaces engineers"
It does not. It compresses the cycle from idea to working code, which means each engineer covers more surface. The job title does not change. The job does.
2. "If you cannot code, you can ship apps now"
You can ship the first version. You cannot ship the second version, because you do not know which parts of the first version are load-bearing.
The bottleneck moves from "writing code" to "understanding code well enough to grow it." That bottleneck is older than AI and has not gotten easier.
3. "AI hallucinates, so you cannot trust it"
AI . So do junior engineers. The fix is the same: a tight feedback loop. Tests pass or they do not. The build deploys or it does not. Trust is built by verifying, not by avoiding.
4. "Just give it the whole repo and let it work"
This works for small repos and breaks badly on real ones. The agent makes locally correct edits that violate constraints it never saw. Constrained inputs and explicit goals beat unbounded autonomy every time.
5. "The model will get smarter, so this will not be a problem"
The model gets smarter. The codebase gets bigger. The expectations get higher. Net difficulty stays roughly constant for the people who keep up.
6. "I do not need to learn the internals anymore"
You need to learn the internals more than ever. The model is a fluent speaker of every framework that ever existed. Without taste, you cannot tell good output from convincing-but-wrong output.
The bar moves from "can you produce code" to "can you judge code." That has been the actual job all along.
Like this? Get the next post in your inbox — two emails a week, every one shippable.
