The AI Developer Apocalypse is a Hoax

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Hey guys, how you doing? Uncle Steph here. So, there's this story going on out there that AI is replacing all these developers. You see these famous um well famous lots of layoffs being documented in the press and now we're seeing some problems occur with that problems are very substantial for the companies.

[00:00:19]Fantastic for developers. As I said when this whole thing started, developers were not being replaced by AI. It's just changing the way we develop. One of the biggest banks in the world said that secretly a lot of these CEOs who are saying, "Hey, we're laying off because of AI." They say that's just the excuse.

[00:00:36]The reason they're laying off is because they overhired over the last few years.

[00:00:40]They overhired. They hired too many people during the pandemic era and now they're just correcting to uh because there's a lot they brought in a lot of people frankly they did not need. Now, you're going to see over the next uh year or so this transition between uh nonAI development to AI development and you're going to see it beyond you're going to see it beyond software development as well because when new technology comes up I've been doing this for 30 years so I understand when new technology comes up there's an adjustment people go oh my god they make all these huge claims and then it kind of settles down so AI will improve improve productivity in in my estimate between 25 and 35% over the next few years which is huge but it's not going to replace developers what's going to happen is that you're just going to have this new batch of developers AI oriented developers you still need to know your fundamentals of code and design patterns and basic system level thinking but it's just shifting that window right it's just shifting that to borrow from politics the Overton window it shifts from this is what we care about for software development to this now And AI is bringing it from here to here with all this new stuff which is going to increase productivity quite a bit. I have seen this before in my career. I've seen when we went from uh system one or model one excuse me development methodologies in uh web apps. I seen from thick client to web app that was a huge change. Huge change. And then we went from system uh excuse me model one development to web apps. uh I won't get into what it is. It's not important for the context of video. Then we went to a model 2. Big change. Big change. Uh yeah and so on so forth. Then we went from uh where the client the front end was very minimal in terms of its uh impact in terms of application web application development and then it became everything with react, angular, view etc. Google maps made that happen by the way. But anyway, point is we've seen these shifts in the window in terms of the window being where we work as developers. I've seen it a few times. So AI is doing it again. I'm telling you guys, having worked with AI for what a lot now, I just finished a a bunch of work using AI to update uh my studio web learning SAS and uh which is a full stack PHP Laravel MVC approach. So I just had to change a few views, some some basic functionality and I decided to do it myself as opposed to getting one of my developers on it.

[00:03:20]And let me tell you, even with AI because in all honesty, I was a little rusty. I haven't looked at Laravel in a while. Even AI, I still had to know what I was doing. It sped up my workflow.

[00:03:32]Woo. It took days of work. Made it, you know, a couple hours. But I had to know what I was doing. I hit I hit some 500 errors, server errors, which the whole thing just I just took down the whole the whole whole damn site.

[00:03:46]And because I knew what I was doing, I was able to fix it. Now, if I didn't know what I was doing, I'd probably be having kittens right now crying smoking four packs of cigarettes if I didn't know how to fix these these bugs. You know, there's three types of bugs in software development if you don't know.

[00:04:03]There's logical bugs, like logical errors that you make. I did that today, by the way. I put the pipes instead of the ends. And uh if you're coder developer, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should do my courses.

[00:04:18]Anyhow, so there are three types of errors in software development. Logical where you make uh you know, you're dealing with conditionals and you make a logical mistake. I did that today. You also have syntactical where you forget to close a conditional statement. You forget, I don't know, you forget a semicolon somewhere. Those are the worst. And then there's of course server issues where uh there's some sort of server problem, server configuration issues. It could be uh a network connection issue. It could be all kinds of different things. Could be a permissions issue. Maybe you you you put in a wrong maybe maybe the permissions uh for database access has changed. So those are the three basic types of errors that you can get and with experience you learn to identify the different errors. So, for example, I added I made an update to one of the views today and I got a 500 error. The whole I took down the whole thing and it was because I I I it was syntactical. I put uh I didn't close an if statement.

[00:05:22]That's it. I didn't close a conditional in one of the views. Stupid. Anyway, so point being is that uh AI did speed up my work because it's kind of like for me I look at AI as kind of like the world's fastest junior dev instead of having to go to Google Stack Overflow etc. you can work with this thing. This thing being the AI and I was working with the latest GPT code might be better now. It's hard to say as I record this video May 11th.

[00:05:51]It changes all the time. That's why I do have modules on how to work with AI as a developer. I have two modules in there including the foundations of code which you still need.

[00:06:03]But I don't get into the detail. I don't say you got to use chachi or you got to use clo because who knows maybe some new AI will come out which will be better than all of them I don't know changes all the time the most important thing and it's always been that case about it's always been this it's always been this way in software development that principles are everything understanding system level design understanding models frontier models versus local models understanding um how to work with them effectively Uh, just a little tip. If you haven't used AI, don't see as a threat. It's just the new power tool. It's the new React. It's the new Angular. It's the new MVC framework. Think of it that way.

[00:06:44]So, working with AI sped up my work quite a bit because it's like the world's fastest junior dev. But, bro, man, it it makes mistakes, too. And I was able to correct the mistakes because I'm a nerd. I'm a temp nerd.

[00:06:59]This damn lighting's changing all the time. But um lighting is changing. It's because the cloud clouds go by changes the light.

[00:07:09]So you're seeing a lot of layoffs because um I think mostly because they overhired. They're just just using AI as an excuse. There's a little bit of layoffs going on because they say, "Oh, we got a lot of productivity." That's also happening as well as combination.

[00:07:22]But I think they're going to it's like they're going to just be hiring developers trained in the new stuff. So if you're a junior, you got to learn the foundations. Like I will pull down courses. I will stop I stop talking about things that I don't think are I know that are not important. Again, based on three decades of experience. I think what qualifies me as a good mentor, well I know I know what does that not only have I been coding for 30 years.

[00:07:50]I've seen all the cycles, but also I've taken products to market several times.

[00:07:54]So I've worked for huge comp corporations uh building software for them uh typically as the lead um and but I more importantly I've taken my own products to market. So I'm not just some YouTuber. That's important because a lot of uh a lot of fake news coder career advice going out there by the uh what what's the term that the Jenna Alphas use uh LAR larper coders or coder larpers something that they're laring a lot of people on there are laring about their software development experience let me tell you some of the biggest names too so there you go so now companies some of the companies who have laid off developers because of AI Why?

[00:08:38]They're going what are we going to do?

[00:08:40]What are we going to do? Because now they're running into some problems. Show the smarter companies like a good friend of mine works at a very big hardware company and they're not they're using AI extensively, but they have no intentions because their leaders are smart.

[00:08:54]The leaders of the company are smart.

[00:08:56]They have no intentions of firing anybody. They just said you got to use AI to be productive. You get these huge productivity gains. Again, I think overall you're going to see 25 to 35% gain in productivity across the board.

[00:09:08]Some areas of development, you'll take days of work into hours. So, it's much more than 35%. In other areas, n you may get a 5% boost. The great thing I'm seeing about AI, for me anyway, it takes away some of the dreary aspects of development. Instead of me having to dig through Stack Overflow articles or as I used to do, thick books to find an answer or search on Google. It's the AI, right? The AI allows you to iterate and very quickly. So I I say, "What's going on here?" And I send it to Co. I say, "I think it's this. What do you think?" He goes, "It's this." And then it tells me something. It's wrong. So, okay, that didn't work. How about this? He goes, "Okay, let me check." Oh, yeah. Here we go. And it's still wrong. I do it again.

[00:09:49]Then it's right.

[00:09:51]But instead of me having to spend two hours searching around, I'm able to get it done in minutes, you know, in a fraction of the time. So learn the AI.

[00:10:01]Learn the AI. So you know, but you got to learn the code. Like I said, I was doing the work today. AI was very helpful.

[00:10:09]Uh sped up the process quite a bit, but I knew what I was doing. I hit a I made a I made a mistake with regards to my syntax and it caused the whole site to go down.

[00:10:18]I got a 500 error. And um then today I also had a logical error as well. What's really cool about the AI, not only could it help you find things quickly, it can explain things to you.

[00:10:31]So when I got I I said, "What's going on here?" It could it can you can grab a piece of code and say, "Okay, this this okay, this worked. Why?" And it will go and it's usually pretty good at that as well.

[00:10:44]There you go, guys. Um I hope you had a good weekend and uh happy Mother's Day to everybody.

[00:10:51]I'm currently fasting fasting. I hear that if you fast it will grow your hair back. That's not true. I don't want to grow my hair back.

[00:11:02]You know what? I'm not totally bald. I'm not totally bald, but I actually prefer my head like this. Uh when I used to have hair, I used to I used to it was like too much trouble combing it and stuff. But I have to say when you are bald um or you got thin hair as your uncle Steph here has, you have to make sure you're in shape. You know, if you're a young guy or person, you want to you want to become uber attractive, just get your body fat down below 20%.

[00:11:32]Ideally, when you look best is slightly muscular, 15% body fat. How do you determine that?

[00:11:41]Just look at photos. You can go do some fancy scans and stuff, MRIs. I don't think Dexters are very accurate. Just do MRI. But you don't do MRI. It cost you $700. Just look at a mirror. just get, you know, get down to your underwear, look in a mirror and just look on the web, you know, 15% body fat, male, put in your height, you know, and you'll see what it is. If if if you know, if you want to pick up, you know, too many of us are overweight now. I was for many years. How do you get how do you lose all that weight? I've lost 60 pounds, kept it off for many, many, many years now. It's habitual change. It's habitual change.

[00:12:32]Heat.