I listened to a podcast recently discussing the “Five Stages of Grief” currently hitting the developer community. As AI capabilities explode, we aren’t just seeing a change in tools; we’re seeing a shift in what it means to be a developer or data engineer.
The loudest pushback often comes from senior developers. The prospect of managing a “team of agents” rather than “hand-crafting” every line of code feels like a loss of artistry. There is a genuine fear of losing the ability to write the “best possible code”.
Whether it’s Denial, Anger, Bargaining, or Depression, developers are cycling through these stages at different speeds. But here is the reality:
We don’t have time to wallow: Our customers don’t pay us for our attachment to the past; they pay us for outcomes, and we need to accept this and move on.
We must bridge the gap by combining the speed of AI with the “expert’s touch.” The specific expertise and care that only decades of enterprise-level deployment can provide.
The Great Irony of Automation
For years, we’ve told our clients to:
“Automate your data so your team can stop cleaning spreadsheets and start driving business value.” Now, the mirror is turned on us. The same logic applies; talented data professionals will need to spend less time “hand-cranking” extraction code and more time solving the high-level business problems that move the needle.
As my colleague Sam Boot recently noted in his post on Agentic AI in Data Engineering , AI is a force multiplier, not a replacement for expertise.
Where does it end? Nobody knows the ceiling for AI capability. However, we can make a judgement on the rate of change by reading this excellent article by the CEO of Anthropic (The Adolescence of Technology) in which Dario Amodei explains that “Three years ago, AI struggled with elementary school arithmetic problems and was barely capable of writing a single line of code.”
Given that rate of change I believe that it will be a safe bet that the future belongs to those who work together with AI agents. At Coeo, we aren’t waiting for the grief to pass, we’re already building what’s next.
If you would like to learn how we can help accelerate your projects, get in touch info@coeo.com