– Hehe... Those arrogant nerds... That'll show 'em! Who's useless now? No more Gitting for you, no more teabagging! Or debugging, I don't remember... Anyway! How dare you not kneel before the grandeur of my idea™? Now, with the help of this little tool called DevinAI I'm gonna make so much money, with no help at all! Okay, how do I sign up again? Where's the confirmation email?
Maybe not you (and I sure hope so), maybe not your friend, but lots of other online mouths keep giving birth to all the kinds of logic-defying abominations like the one above. DevinAI this, DevinAI that, engineers are already losing their jobs, "software developers are done for" – scream the headlines.
Man, if that's what you think – you are done for, not them. And today I'm gonna proudly tell you why exactly you are doomed and no AI will come to the rescue:
Year 1830. Lawnmowers.
The thing that singlehandedly (or should I say single-bladingly) destroyed the gardening industry. As you know, since the year 1830 when the first lawnmower was invented, the gardening industry has been in exponential decline. The gardeners were left in shambles, forced to turn to prostitution and organised crime to survive, and Andrew Jackson sent his first nuke to Gloucestershire.
"Mommy, who is this scary man?" said an 8-year girl pointing to a rough-looking homeless man. "Let's go baby, he's just a gardener" said her mom, grabbing her by the hand and quickly moving across the street. "You're the only green I see now..." mumbled the gardener rolling one up.
Sadly, this is what happens when an automation tool is being introduced to the market. People lose their jobs, chaos ensues.
Do you see where I'm going? Okay, I'm gonna say it loud and clear: you won't create anything worthy if your dev team is only DevinAI. Unless you're not an engineer yourself, obviously. DevinAI, as basically EveryOtherAI out there, is just an automation tool. It doesn't replace developers, you dummy – it makes them stronger! It's an incredible tool, a technological miracle even, but only in the hands of a professional engineer.
To further illustrate my point – go to any suburb and watch the lawns. I'm no Akinator, but I bet you that the lawns that are the least taken care of, belong to people who once said the following words: "I'm gonna buy this lawnmower and mow my lawn myself – I don't need no gardener!". And now their grass is tall and the lawnmower dusty.
On a side note, did you know that good developers spend 80%-90% of their time debugging, and only 10%-20% actually writing new code? Who's gonna debug the code you've "written" with the help of DevinAI? The project manager? Oh, and there will absolutely be bugs.
Rest assured, the day an AI can write bug-free code, deploy it, prepare its documentation and give itself a pat on the back, it will be cheaper to hire a team of software engineers. We'll come full circle eventually. And what about the actual ability to create? We're still a looong way from singularity, from having AI actually "invent" stuff – all you get is a regurgitated mess of everything that it managed to chew up on its daily walks on the Internet. It's a glorified parrot.
Wanna invest in AI? Go for it! Hell, invest in several AI tools. But invest in a strong software engineer team first. They will be thankful, as will you.
Because if you don't, your startup will be stuck in the "tweet some dumb shit about how AI helped you 'develop' a 'crucial' feature and how quickly you advance along the roadmap" stage forever. And the developers will be laughing at you and pointing fingers. And the investors will keep asking for an MVP that you won't have.
Do yourself a favour and hire a functional dev team today – be it an in-house or remote one. There's a multitude of platforms where you can just input your needs and get a personalised selection of experienced remote software engineers, like, literally the next day. And for a fraction of price of an in-house developer. It has literally never been easier.
Take Match.dev for example (ahem, yours truly) – we've carefully crafted our own pool of vetted software engineers, for every tech stack you can imagine. It works like this – we make a quick intro call, you tell us an approximation of what you need, and we do the heavy lifting. We'll then present you with a list of developers that match your needs – devs that have passed through the Nine Circles of recruitment Hell and have come out of it alive. All that in under 48 hours.
Or go sign up to DevinAI and make a lagging to-do app, that's an option.
So, what team are you on? Team blue (AKA the "I'm gonna be wise, invest in talent and create jobs" team) or team red (AKA the "I'm smarter than everyone else and I'm gonna do everything myself" team)? Decide! The end is nigh! Or should it take Andrew Jackson anoth-
– Sir, this is a Wendy's