Software Developer in the Age of AI. Something Strange Is Happening to Our Profession

A software developer describes how AI coding agents are changing day-to-day work and what risks come with that shift. The author recalls earlier debugging habits—reading documentation, using breakpoints, and spending hours on stack traces—but says that today, when stuck, AI can provide useful answers in seconds. Increasingly, the developer hands an AI agent repository access and instructs it to add features, fix bugs, write tests, or refactor code, then observes it search, edit, run tests, and iterate after failures. The article warns that AI-generated code can look professional yet be wrong in subtle ways, turning developers into “inspectors” who must verify systems beyond surface correctness.