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Nat Rubio-Licht
Feb 18, 2026•12:53am Europe/Dublin
The developer role shifts to orchestrating AI
When AI can create apps from simple prompts, many developers are left wondering what to do with their time.
The tech’s ability to generate practically anything in the digital domain has triggered a number of questions about how these capabilities will change the way tech workers, well … work. Coding tools like Claude Code have entirely automated something that once required a fleet of eager college grads to complete.
The result? Developers are becoming managers, rather than creators. And executives are eating it up:
- Canva’s CTO Jesal Gadhia told Business Insider that most of the company’s senior engineers spend their time reviewing AI-generated code, rather than writing it themselves. As a result, they’ve produced an “unprecedented amount of code” in the last 12 months.
- Meanwhile, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström said in the company’s recent earnings call that its most talented developers haven’t handwritten “a single line of code since December.”
- And Dan Cox, the CTO of Axios, said that the company used AI agents to complete a project in 37 minutes that took one of its best engineers three weeks to complete the previous year.
While this might be fine for senior developers, the question remains of how this will impact the green coders who are just entering the workforce, especially amid the plethora of mixed signals on how AI is impacting the job market.
Some estimates paint a bleak picture: According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York analyzing the degrees with the highest unemployment rate, computer engineering and computer science ranked in the top five, at 7.8% and 7%, respectively.
Others, however, point to AI transforming certain jobs, rather than completely killing them. A Gartner study, for instance, said that 50% of the workers laid off as a result of AI will be rehired to do similar work. It’s a sentiment that IBM is taking into its own hiring practices as it plans to triple entry-level headcount, but shift focus away from technical tasks that AI can do to instead have these staffers focus on person-to-person jobs that need human skills.
Our Deeper View
An argument can be made that creation requires humanity. Art, music, literature: these are things that are born as a result of channeling the human experience into an artistic medium so that we can relate to one another. But that argument is a little more difficult to make for technical skills like coding. As these systems become more capable of doing technical work, human creation might become more valuable. As Daniela Amodei said in a recent interview with ABC News: “In a world where AI is very smart and capable of doing so many things, the things that make us human will become much more important.”
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