AI Won’t Replace Coders, but It Will Reshape the Job

Artificial intelligence is unlikely to push programmers out of the labor market, but it is already changing how software gets built. Natalya Kasperskaya, president of InfoWatch, argues that IT professions are not disappearing so much as mutating: developers will increasingly assign work to neural networks and verify the results instead of writing every line of code manually from start to finish.

The logic is straightforward. Across IT, tools that generate code fragments, tests, and documentation are already becoming standard. That shifts the engineer’s role away from typing lines of code and toward defining tasks clearly and catching mistakes before they ship.

That pattern is visible in products from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI, which market their AI assistants as an added layer on top of conventional development rather than a full replacement for it.

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Kasperskaya highlights a central weakness of generative models: they can produce an error with complete confidence, and a human may not spot it right away. As a result, manual work in software development is not going away. It is moving into review, testing, and debugging.

She also points to a broader pressure on the industry. In the US and Europe, companies are already cutting IT budgets primarily to save money, not because of AI alone. If that trend continues, the heaviest impact is likely to fall on junior specialists and workers who previously handled routine, template-based tasks.

Demand, in turn, is likely to grow fastest for engineers who can:

• write effective prompts for a model
• verify its output
• turn the result into a working product