This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 26-year-old Andrew Caldwell, a software engineer in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Business Insider has verified his identity and background. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve always loved the art of writing code and building things. When I was a kid, I made games on Roblox and helped my father automate some tasks for his job as a voiceover artist.
That led me to a career in software development, and I’ve been working in the space for about 9 ½ years. I started as an intern at a marketing firm in high school, and now I’m at a financial services firm, leading five other developers.
I remember when ChatGPT came out. Somebody told me it could write code, and at the time, I had a large dataset that I needed to convert to another format, so I had ChatGPT create a program to handle the task. There were a few things I had to fix, but overall it wrote a fairly complex formatting program just by a prompt. I was blown away.
I’ve since switched to using Claude for all my coding needs, and my job as a software developer has changed in three profound ways:
I’m hardly writing code from scratch
About 80% of the code I push out now is AI-generated, though there’s a difference between how complex a task is and how much it speeds you up.
For simple stuff, AI makes things exponentially faster. What might have taken me six-ish hours can now take 10 minutes. If I’m building a fairly complex system, I’m saving time on typing, but the thought process can take longer, so it goes from maybe six hours to four hours.
This doesn’t mean I have a shorter workday. The roadmap of things to be built is almost never-ending, so I’m just building more and faster than before.
I’m working in new areas of development
I used to work almost exclusively on the web side, doing front-end and back-end development. AI changed that.
Before AI, the dev teams I worked with had a rigid divide between front-end, back-end, mobile, and QA. Each wrote their own code. While those divisions still exist, a lot of the disciplines are merging.
Recently, my team needed to build a mobile companion app for one of our web apps. It can take a while to move between development disciplines, especially when dealing with different languages or frameworks. But AI sped up that transition for me. I was able to go from not having worked in the mobile space to helping my team submit an app to Apple and Google for approval within three weeks.
I’m spending a lot more time reviewing code.
Before generative AI hit the scene, I spent more time writing code than planning, reviewing, and testing it. Now, the opposite is true.
Reviewing code is more important than ever. I’ve seen AI confidently recommend code libraries that don’t exist. It can also create code that looks and functions well, but contains serious security issues. This is why I have a policy with my team that no code goes live unless it has been thoroughly reviewed by a senior developer.
I also want every developer on my team who submits code to understand what it means, even if they didn’t write it themselves. If I spend five hours writing 1,000 lines of code, I understand how the data flows and how the system functions from working on it. If I just ask AI to do it, I’ll have less of an understanding of the system as a whole than if I built it myself.
I talk about skill atrophy a lot with my team. One thing I’ve been trying to do recently to prevent that from happening is to hand-code for about two-ish hours a day. I still love being a software developer, but I miss some of the difficulty it used to bring.
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