I’ve spent the last year as a Technical Lead leaning on AI every day, and trust me, it’s brilliant at repetitive work but stumbles on creativity and context. AI alone won’t steal your job and the ones who do exactly what they’re told will get left behind.
We’ve been bombarded with thumbnails and podcasts screaming “Coding is dead,” “Software engineer is dead,” etc..etc..all clickbait hype.
🤔 Are You at Risk of Being Replaced?
- You will be replaced if you are robotic and do only what you are told to.
- You will be replaced if you lack creative problem solving and never push beyond the obvious.
In other words: if your value is just “execute tasks,” AI can do it faster. But when you bring empathy, critical thinking, context and creativity; no algorithm can match that.
🤜🤛 Why AI Feels Like Your Work Buddy
- Cuts out the repetitive stuff so you can dive into real challenges
- Sparks fresh angles when you hit a wall or need to switch gears
- Teaches you neat new tricks and tools as you go
Here’s an example of how it helped me:
In October 2024 at ecobee, a firmware update sent our SmartSensors out of sync, causing odd temperature swings and a flood of support tickets. I fed AI our device logs and error reports, and it quickly spotted a timing glitch in the sensor handshake. It even generated a simple diagnostic script. We rolled that out in under 24 hours, cut sensor-sync tickets in half, and gave our engineers back their evenings.
How to Partner with AI and Become Irreplaceable
- Define your goal before you prompt.
- Add context, share your project details, constraints and audience.
- Iterate on outputs, ask “what if” questions, refine tone, request examples.
- Inject your judgement, review suggestions, adapt them to real-world needs.
- Measure and learn, track which prompts and models boost your productivity.
Real World Use Cases
- 📝 Drafting complex documentation in minutes, then infusing it with your voice.
- 🔍 Generating test cases from user stories so you never miss an edge case.
- ⚙️ Automating deployment scripts so you can audit and optimize them.
- 📊 Summarizing meeting transcripts into action items that actually get done.
- 💬 Role playing stakeholder interviews to sharpen your communication skills.
Keep Growing and Follow My AI Prompt Research
I’m diving deep into AI prompting every week, testing new tricks to boost efficiency, spark creativity and solve real-world challenges. Follow me here on DEV.to to get the latest insights and prompts that will help you own your role in the age of AI.
Top comments (8)
I really liked how you called AI a work buddy that helps with the boring parts and lets us focus on real problems. The example with the SmartSensors was clear and showed how AI can help when you give it good info. That part made me think. I wrote some thoughts on this too. You can have a look if you want:
AI Will Replace You (But Not How You Think): Win the Job Race
Md Asaduzzaman Atik ・ May 13
Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly replace many people, and job opportunities in the market will undoubtedly decrease as well, but other jobs will emerge that do not require you to be a perfect software engineer, but rather to be good enough to work in those jobs.
Maybe not. It just gonna cut the "fat" (I don't like to call as that but can't find a better analogy).
Market got flooded with tons of fast processed devs from 2020 to 2022 ish, also a lot of management layers and useless positions in some cases.
That's gonna be teared down by AI. I just saw a lot of releases these weeks on my project of Scrum masters that no one ever sees value, its kind of cruel but honestly they weren't giving any value and their stories were written with the Jira AI....
It's a nice read, which somehow motivates me to not stop investing in my skills. Studying and testing different AI tools may be a key. I'm not talking about full implementation into your workflow, but at least we need to be aware.
I have just seen the comparison of AI-generated video in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Huge difference. It will be interesting to see the progress with AI coding and how different tools will impact us.
I am currently waiting for an imaging task to complete while I build out my homelab. I used an AI agent to plan my project. I argued with it over the best way to do a task. It was suggesting I use terraform to populate ansible inventory, and I'm fairly new at terraform but I know that Ansible is awesome at modifying text files, that's part of how it can configure linux so well, and I could see that the terraform method was treating the inventory file as a resource, and that it could only write it again from scratch, no modifications.
Anyway, I was careful to review the results, and I went through many refinement steps to get the plan right. And that was all before writing the first line of code for the project. So far the Saturday tasks are, as predicted by me, taking 10 times as long as the agent estimated. My prompt for that estimate did not include the time spent iterating through prompts and answers.
In the end this is all a win for me. Even though it's taken me several hours to do something that could be knocked out in an hour, I am going to end up with a bundle of code (iac ftw) which can be used to repeat the process, or used as a template for deploying other services. AND when I'm at work, I will be just a little bit better at writing prompts than I was last week.
I think this is a great way of putting it
This was a nice real...loved the SmartSensor example ..
Good insights.