Software developers are not against more automation in their work – quite the opposite.

This image is from the “Tech Manifesto” I put together when I was at 7digital, 12 years ago. One of the principles was: “We prefer not to do the same thing twice”.

The best engineers and teams automate everything that moves – tests, build and deployment, monitoring, alerting, infrastructure provisioning. They use rich IDEs with refactoring tools, code formatters, linters, and even, dare I say it, code generation (which has been around long before GenAI, by the way).

It’s about reducing toil, eliminating waste, getting fast feedback, and making space to focus on the more meaningful and enjoyable parts of the job.

Things like understanding and solving real-world problems, turning ideas into working software, building useful things. Creating.

Exactly the parts GenAI still isn’t any good at.