Man Who Said AI Will Never Replace Developers Replaced by Developer Using AI
The engineer, who published a widely shared post titled "Calm Down," has been reassigned to reviewing the pull requests that replaced him.
AUSTIN, Texas — Local software engineer Darren Whitcombe, 41, author of the viral 2024 blog post "AI Will Never Replace Developers, and Here's Why," was informed Tuesday that his role had been eliminated and its responsibilities absorbed by a colleague who uses AI.
"To be clear, I still stand by the post," Whitcombe told reporters from a coffee shop, where he was updating his LinkedIn. "AI did not replace me. Kevin replaced me. Kevin uses AI. That's an important distinction and I plan to write about it."
The post, which has been viewed 2.3 million times, argued that software engineering requires "judgment, context, and taste," qualities Whitcombe said no model could replicate. His employer, a mid-sized logistics platform, agreed, and noted in his exit paperwork that Kevin supplies the judgment, context and taste, while the model supplies "the other 91 percent."
Kevin Adebayo, 29, said he felt bad about the situation and had tried to include Whitcombe in the transition. "I asked him to pair with me on the agent workflow," Adebayo said. "He spent the whole session pointing out places where the code was slightly worse than what he'd write. He was right every time. It took him four hours. The agent did it in six minutes and then I fixed the three things."
Whitcombe's final assignment was reviewing a 4,000-line pull request generated by Adebayo's setup. He left 212 comments. All were addressed by the agent in 40 seconds, with a note thanking him for his "thorough and thoughtful review."
He plans to publish a follow-up post next week titled "OK, But Here's What AI Still Can't Do," which sources say the agent has already drafted for him.