Summary
Lately when I scroll Douyin during break time, I keep seeing the same kinds of comments under coding videos:
- "AI is here. Programmers will lose their jobs soon."
- "I'm just a normal person, but with AI I can also build a website or a mini-program."
- "I'm a humanities student with no coding background. In this AI era, what I make is better than what programmers make."
Basically these three sum up what I've been seeing repeated everywhere.
How I See AI
I started using ChatGPT from 2022. The first time, honestly, the feeling was: this is powerful. Really powerful. A lot of things I used to search on Google, now I can just ask and get the answer. But back then, I treated it like a tutor, or maybe a smarter search engine. When I got stuck on a project, I asked it. When I didn't understand something while studying, I let it explain. That was basically my whole usage. Even so, I felt this was the start of something big.
By 2024, the change went further than I expected. After the concept of Agent appeared, people stopped just chatting with AI and started letting AI into their projects — letting it modify code, write code, ship code directly. That's when I also started building with Agents myself, looking into MCP, LangChain, RAG, and so on.
From 2022 until now, AI slowly became part of my daily life. For a while, the main feeling around AI was: convenience. But somewhere along the way, this changed — into fear.
Between late 2024 and late 2025, I could clearly feel the mood on social media. Phrases like "AI is replacing programmers" were everywhere. I'll be honest, there was a period when I started doubting myself, getting pulled into the anxiety vortex with everyone else.
I didn't stay in it for long. I eventually figured out something that I haven't changed my mind on since: AI doesn't replace roles. It redefines the people inside those roles.
The way I think about it is simple — AI is a multiplier.
- is your own ability
- is the boost AI gives you
- is what you actually produce
Say AI multiplies everyone's ability by 10. A person whose ability is 1 will produce 10. A person whose ability is 10 will produce 100.
AI doesn't make anyone suddenly impressive. It just exposes, more harshly, what you actually had to begin with.
To be honest, this point shouldn't really need a whole blog post. But on Douyin, on Xiaohongshu, in WeChat moments, the "I have no respect for engineering" energy has gotten loud. And what bothers me more is that the people saying these things often don't really know what they're saying.
So the rest of this post is for them.
A Few Words for the "Hot Take" Crowd
I'll just say it directly: I think this kind of person has a real gap in understanding. If you want to work in computing but you don't understand computing itself, then no matter how powerful the AI you use, what you build will be shallow.
Using AI doesn't mean you can disrespect software engineering as a discipline. The people who confidently say things like this — most of them are just running stuff on localhost:3000, watching it work on their own laptop, and feeling really good about themselves.
Yes, some entry-level coding work might disappear. But this is how markets and society have always worked — there's always quiet attrition running in the background. Having AI doesn't mean you are good. Take AI away from this crowd, and ask honestly: what's left? Engineering, as a craft, is something humanity has been building up over decades, even longer. It deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed just because the productivity floor got lower.
I'm not looking down on things made with AI. What I look down on is this specific group — the ones who think owning AI makes them powerful, the ones who flip it around and say programmers are about to be replaced, "because anything programmers can do, I can do too."
When this kind of person ships something real, with actual users, and that thing breaks — they have no way to fix it. This is not just irresponsible to users. It's contempt for the work itself, and for the ethics that come with it.
For example: in July 2025, an app called Tea, a women's safety app for dating, had a data leak. Around 72,000 user photos got exposed publicly, including about 13,000 government-issued IDs like driver's licenses and passports. It wasn't a sophisticated breach. It was a Firebase bucket with no authentication at all, sitting open on default settings. Security researchers later mentioned that the underlying code was reportedly generated by AI tools and never properly reviewed. Cyber Defense Magazine
A system where nobody changed the default config — holding tens of thousands of real people's identity documents.
This is what I mean by contempt. When you don't understand what you wrote, or what AI wrote for you, you think you are "shipping a product." Actually you are paying for your own ignorance with someone else's privacy.
Use AI. But know what you're doing first.