The tech world never stops moving, and every couple of years somebody swears that “coding is dead”. Spoiler: it never is. What actually happens is a radical, sometimes uncomfortable, always fascinating transformation.
AI, multi-agent SPARC tools, and new expectations are reshaping the craft.
The declining value of a line of code and the rise of AI
There was a time when writing code felt like machining an engine by hand, line after painstaking line. You got brain pain but you were happy. Even a tiny to-do item could hide twenty hours of tinkering, and the knowledge you built up made you a prized hire.
Then the AI blitz happened:
- GitHub Copilot took autocompletion to a new level. It predicts what you want, fills in boilerplate, and saves oceans of typos. Try it once and working without it feels like typing with ski-gloves.
- The “monster” ChatGPT arrived next. It annihilated the need to hoard arcane trivia, because it always seems to have the right answer ready. Entire projects, stack traces, or obscure compile errors? Ask, copy, move on.
- AI-powered IDEs like Windsurf or Cursor let you ditch the keyboard almost entirely. You talk in long prompts, they ship proof-of-concepts in minutes. A job that cost you two days of sweat now pops out in ten minutes.
When a tool can spit out perfect syntax on demand, a single line of code becomes less valuable. Many devs feel nostalgic as once-hard challenges melt away in seconds.
The next wave: multi-agent and SPARC tools
Just when chat-based helpers looked unbeatable, SPARC (Self-Prompting Agent Reasoning and Collaboration) tools showed up. Tools like Roo Code spin up swarms of cooperating agents. One writes tests, one refactors, another updates docs, while a planner agent keeps them aligned.
These agents coordinate and handle the whole life-cycle. Single assistants like Google Code Assist already feel old. You don’t chat with an assistant anymore, you brief an artificial project team.
From carpenter to architect: a new vocation
AI boosts productivity but can drain the thrill. The hard problems that once lit up your day bring nothing because the bot fixes them instantly.
The client only cares about solved problems, not heroics. Our craft is shifting toward perspective. Think of the transition from carpenter to architect: swinging a hammer matters less, while understanding load-bearing structures and how everything fits together matter more. The real joy now is launching something that brings value to users.
Old joke: a junior writes one thousand lines per week, a senior fifty, yet the senior costs more. Why? They spend time thinking instead of typing. Today AI can crank out thousands of lines without blinking. You still need someone who decides which fifty matter.
Architecture matters
Every “developer-killing” wave created fresh specializations:
- No-code/Low-code platforms led to experts who design data models, handle edge cases, and earn more than the coders they “replaced”.
- Cloud didn’t erase sysadmins; it turned them into DevOps engineers, scripting infra and pipelines.
- Offshoring cut costs until people realized context and communication matter, pushing companies back toward mixed or distributed teams.
AI follows the same pattern. It produces plausible code but often with weak architecture or subtle inconsistencies. Someone must verify, refactor, secure, and maintain that flood. AI excels at local optimization but fails at global design. When implementation speed jumps, bad decisions pile up faster.
For disposable landing pages that’s fine; for long-lived systems it’s catastrophic. Solid system architecture is the one skill the bots lack, and its value grows as code generation accelerates.
More than a coder
Large organizations already weigh coding at about twenty percent of a dev’s evaluation. The rest:
- Understanding the product and proposing features
- Collaborating across teams
- Mentoring others
- Keeping a strategic view
- Building company visibility through talks, articles, or open-source
- Leading or managing when needed
- Thinking like an entrepreneur and spotting business value
AI narrows the gap between juniors and seniors on raw code. That makes mentoring, reviews, and vision more important.
So, is coding dead?
Being a developer in 2025 barely resembles the role in 2023. The richness of the profession sits in teamwork, vision, and strategy. These qualities AI is nowhere near replacing. Sure, the “super coder” aura is fading, but that frees up room for no-coders, vibe-coders, and old-school devs alike to tackle bigger, more interesting problems.
If you can step back, see the system, and guide a swarm of human and artificial specialists toward a goal, you are more relevant than ever.
The code you personally type may shrink, yet your impact can explode.
Pick up the blueprint, architect. The skyline is waiting.