I’ve been playing music since I could walk and writing my own songs since I was a teenager. I’ve been writing code since I was a teenager. Professionally, since 1995. Now I’m in my 50s, and I’ve watched both industries go through multiple rounds of “this technology will replace humans.”
In the 80s, MIDI and synthesizers were supposed to eliminate musicians. Samplers could reproduce any instrument. Drum machines kept perfect time. Why would anyone need a band?
What actually happened: the tools became instruments. New genres emerged. Electronic, industrial, hip-hop production techniques that couldn’t have existed otherwise. Musicians who adapted found territory that didn’t exist before.
But guitars didn’t become obsolete. Neither did drummers. They coexist with programmed beats and synthetic textures. The most interesting music to me now uses both.
The Part That’s Actually Worth Worrying About
The junior developer concern is legitimate, and I don’t think we’ve solved it yet.
Here’s the thing about synthesizers: they still required you to understand music. You needed to know theory, rhythm, song structure, arrangement. The entry point shifted. You didn’t need to master an acoustic instrument first. But the fundamentals still mattered. A kid with a laptop and Ableton still has to learn why certain chord progressions work and others don’t.
With AI handling the kind of tasks that used to be entry-level programming work, I’m not sure where beginners learn the fundamentals anymore. The traditional path was: junior developer writes simple functions, maintains existing code, fixes small bugs. That work taught you how systems fit together, why certain patterns exist, what happens when you take shortcuts.
If AI handles all of that, what’s the new entry point? Where do people develop the judgment that only comes from making mistakes and fixing them?
What I Think Happens Next
AI tools aren’t going away, and they’re getting better. Fighting that is pointless. The developers who adapt will find new territory. Work that requires understanding business context, legacy system knowledge, and the kind of judgment calls AI can’t make.
The frameworks and languages will keep evolving too. AI might accelerate that rather than prevent it. Tools optimized for AI-assisted development, languages that make intent clearer, patterns that emerge from how humans and AI collaborate.
But we need to figure out the pipeline problem. Synthesizers democratized music production without eliminating the need to understand music. We need AI-assisted development to work the same way. Lowering barriers without removing the requirement to actually understand what you’re building.
I don’t know what that looks like yet. Neither does anyone else, despite the confident predictions on both sides.
The technology will sort itself out. It always does. The human systems around it, education, career paths, how people learn to think like programmers, that’s the harder problem.