Will AI replace programmers? Not completely, at least not yet. AI can already read a whole codebase faster than any of us, so knowledge alone won't protect our jobs. After more than 20 years of programming, I think the one thing we still have is gut feeling: the sense that something is off before you can explain why. The hard part is that gut feeling only comes with years of work, and that makes it much harder for new programmers to get started.
I talked this through in Cantonese on my podcast, with English subtitles on screen.
Why does working in IT feel so hard right now?
Because AI can do a lot of the work that used to go to new hires. A friend who works in IT told me the industry is getting harder and harder. If you're looking for a job now, how do you even find one? Companies can ask: why hire someone new when AI can already do much of it?
People who have been in a company for years still have something to offer. They can say, "I've worked on this system, I know how it works." But if they want to move to a new position somewhere else, that history counts for much less.
How fast can AI learn your codebase?
Very fast. Give it the codebase and it understands the whole thing quickly. The knowledge you built up over years, AI can pick up in a short time.
That's what worries people. If AI can learn what we know that quickly, it can take over a lot of what we do.
What can't AI replace in a programmer?
For now, I think it's gut feeling. It isn't very scientific, and it isn't really knowledge either. It's what you build after years of touching code and building things.
Here's how it works in practice. Say you take over someone else's job and their code lands on your desk. You don't need to read every line. Sometimes you just watch how it runs and think, "Hmm, that isn't right." I honestly can't explain it with a scientific method. But when you've written code for that long and someone hands you a piece of software, you can see it.
How does gut feeling catch AI hallucinations?
It tells you when an answer feels wrong, even if it sounds right. These days I don't only read code. I also ask AI to explain a piece of code to me, and then I have to judge whether the explanation holds up.
Some people say AI has even learned to lie. I don't think it's lying. It's hallucinating, which means it gives a wrong answer with full confidence. That's where gut feeling earns its keep: you can sense that it's a hallucination, that it's wrong, before you've proven it.
Why is it harder for junior developers now?
Because gut feeling takes years, and juniors haven't had those years yet. If the thing that still protects experienced programmers is something only experience gives you, a new programmer starts with nothing to point to. AI does the easy tasks they used to learn on, and they don't yet have the instinct that makes a senior worth keeping.
I don't have an easy answer for this. It's the part of the story that bothers me most.
Can AI reverse engineer your software without the code?
Yes. On YouTube I've seen people talk about reverse engineering with AI: they decompile someone else's program and use AI to take it apart. But AI is advanced enough now that it doesn't even need to decompile.
Instead, the AI runs your software over and over, watches how it's used, and works out the logic behind it. Then it can rewrite the code. You only have to hand it the finished program. So the knowledge locked inside a piece of software is getting easier to copy too.
That's why I say being an IT programmer is really challenging right now.
What am I seeing about programmers in China?
My social media feed keeps showing me posts from programmers in China who say they've been made redundant. I don't know if that's just the algorithm, so treat it as what I see, not as official data.
My guess is that there's still a lot of labour-heavy work there, the kind of task that is easier to replace. And many of the people posting look like juniors in their early thirties. That's a risky place to be.
What's next: are freelancers even easier to replace?
I think so, and that's my next podcast episode. If AI can take a full program and rebuild it, freelancers who sell one-off pieces of work may feel it even sooner than people inside a company.
This is part of my Programming in the Age of AI series. In the last part I looked at my own numbers in Is the programmer outdated?: I typed about 8,800 words to AI agents in a month and they wrote about 36,000 lines of code. If you want to see what AI coding looks like for a hobby project, read how I built games with Godot and Claude, or try one of the learning games on this site.
If you work in IT, how long do you think gut feeling will keep protecting us? I'd really like to hear.
Based on my Cantonese podcast recorded in Brisbane on 8 November 2026. The point about China comes from posts in my own social media feed, not from official figures. Images were made with Qwen Image 2.1 for the video. AI helped me edit the English.
