AI Can't Replace Us – We Know Too Much

1 week ago 5

It’s hard to avoid the refrain that AI is out for our jobs. That all developers will be replaced by LLMs and we’ll all have to brush up on our prompt engineering or just become gardeners (tempting, to be honest…).

But developers don’t just write code, we also know how everything actually works. Which systems are held together with wishes and crossed fingers. We’re deeply embedded in how companies operate, and more often than not, we’re what’s keeping the lights on.

The AI doesn’t know:

Which of the seven Google Docs actually describes the current infrastructure (and which one was just hopes & dreams).
That we’re halfway through migrating from Jira to Notion to Linear, and will probably back to Jira by the time that’s done, just with more grey hair.
Why you’ve already ruled out that vendor and don’t need another two hour rambling demo call and 5 day implementation consultation.
Which Slack thread from six months ago contains the final decision about the logging library. (Not the one in the spec, or the pinned message - Brian didn’t like that one.)
That one server on a non-standard cloud provider, running a lonely cron job, is the only thing holding your data stack together.
That restarting the prod server breaks the firewall config unless you remember to run fixfirewall.sh and pray.
That you have to divide that metric by two to get the actual value. No one remembers why.
How that one undocumented supplier API works, and why it only returns 14 pages of data unless you pass the "more" flag.
That one special customer with a custom setup, maintained in a fork of a fork in a separate GitHub org. Don’t forget to update it.
That the contractor who built the weird glue layer between two ancient vendor systems is gone. And so is their documentation. And maybe their LinkedIn.
That orders over £100 get free shipping unless they contain an item in the Fresh Produce category, or involves anyone with the first name Angela.
Why RG needs to FFL the TNO on Fridays or the RT will get PO’d. No, the other TNO.

AI will give you a boost. It’ll speed up development, often take entire problems off your hands, and point out awkward phrasing in my writing (which I may choose to ignore…). It’s like pairing with an overconfident intern who read a blog post and now wants to rewrite everything in Rust.

But developers aren’t just coders. We’re archives of institutional knowledge, tape dispensers holding together years of compromises, and the experience that holds the messy, mismatched parts of reality in place.

If you’re not already embedded in that mess - well, it might be time.

Oh and yeah, sure - we should document this stuff. But let’s be honest: we won’t. Not properly.

Which is exactly why we’re sticking around.

💡

I’d love to hear your examples of that small bit of undocumented knowledge that holds everything together. Get in touch and let me know!

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