You Are Not Your Code

Why Every Dev Needs to Understand AI — Like It or Not

 

Max Rydahl Andersen
Red Hat Distinguished Engineer & STSM, IBM
Quarkus co-lead
Human
@maxandersen
Red Hat Developer Day
Aarhus @ Bankdata
2 June 2025

A quick show of hands

  • Who used AI to write code this week?

  • Who refused to use AI this week?

  • Who is quietly worried answering either question?

The two reactions I keep hearing

"This is the biggest productivity jump of my career."

"This is going to destroy the craft I love."

Both are honest.
Neither is a strategy.

AI writing code is not "the future"

It is already happening:

  • In your IDE

  • In your PRs

  • In your boss’s emails

  • In your teammate’s commits

  • In the code you’re about to review

The question is no longer if.
It’s how you relate to it.

The uncomfortable middle

It's not "AI replaces devs".
It's not "AI is useless hype".

For years we worked to raise the ceiling.
AI didn't raise the ceiling. It blew the roof off.

Turns out that wasn't entirely comforting.

  • The floor came up — juniors can do more, sooner
  • The ceiling moved — seniors are more leveraged than ever
  • The middle gets squeezed from both sides
  • That's uncomfortable — and that's where most of us live
Four developers
The Enthusiast The Skeptic The Pragmatist The Quietly Lost

The Enthusiast

"I ship 3x more. I can finally build the side projects I dreamed about. Why is anyone still typing by hand?"
  • Strength: leverage, exploration, momentum
  • Risk: shipping code they don't understand
  • Risk: weakening of skills they'll need when the model is wrong
  • Risk: mistaking output for value

The Skeptic

"It hallucinates. It writes plausible nonsense. I spent more time fixing it than writing it myself. The craft matters."
  • Strength: taste, rigor, defending quality
  • Risk: judging today's tools by last year's experience
  • Risk: rejecting what works because it feels wrong
  • Risk: becoming the person the team routes around

The Pragmatist

"I use it for the boring stuff. Tests, scaffolding, that regex I always forget. I don't use it for the parts I actually care about."
  • Strength: clear sense of where it helps
  • Strength: still owns the architecture and the hard calls
  • Risk: the boundary between "my work" and "AI work" shifts faster than expected
  • Risk: comfortable today, overtaken tomorrow

The Quietly Lost

"Everyone on my team is doing this. I nod in standup. I don't actually know what tools they use or whether I'm falling behind. If the code writes itself… what am I?"
  • Strength: self-aware and ready to learn
  • Risk: silence becomes a career problem
  • Risk: shame stops them asking
  • I didn't see this group at first — then I saw them everywhere
  • You are not the only one
Four developers
The Enthusiast The Skeptic The Pragmatist The Quietly Lost

"You Are Not Your Code"

Why does this shift feel personal?

  • We learned to identify with what we type

  • "I am a Java developer." "I am a backend dev."

  • Years of mastery — keystroke by keystroke

  • A tool that types for you feels like a tool typing over you

Code is the artifact, not the job

Before

  • Type code
  • Read code
  • Debug code
  • Review code

After

  • Decide what code
  • Direct the generation
  • Verify it's correct
  • Own the outcome

The verbs got bigger.
The responsibility got bigger.

I was the Enthusiast

  • I got excited. Really excited.

  • I rebuilt workflows. I shipped faster. I felt like I’d unlocked a cheat code.

  • I assumed my team would feel the same — that most developers would

  • They didn’t

Some were cautious. Some were quiet. Some pushed back.
And I couldn’t understand why.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realise:
I was so caught up in what the tools could do, I forgot to ask what the people around me were feeling.

The questions you’re not asking out loud

  • Will I still matter in three years?

  • Is my experience becoming less valuable?

  • Am I falling behind right now?

  • If the code writes itself… what am I?

 

These are not weak questions.
These are the questions of someone paying attention.

The craft didn’t shrink — it shifted

  • What AI is bad at is exactly the senior-engineer list

    • Knowing what it doesn’t know. Long-range consistency. Saying "don’t build this."

  • When everyone can generate code, what you choose to keep is the differentiator

    • Taste in architecture. Taste in API design. Taste in when to stop.

  • A model can suggest. It cannot care.

What you thought made you valuable

What's fading

  • Remembering APIs
  • Writing boilerplate
  • Knowing framework internals by heart
  • Typing faster than everyone else

What still matters

  • Judgment — knowing what to build and what to stop
  • Taste — recognizing good from good enough
  • Curiosity — the drive to understand why
  • Empathy — for users, teammates, future maintainers
  • Trust — the kind you earn by owning outcomes

What actually is working for us

  • Share your AI experiments openly — "hand in your AI story, no judgment"

  • We listen. We don’t judge.

  • Weekly "getting better at Claude" — room to mess up, be curious

  • Don’t push automation on people — don’t type over them

  • Let teams/people find their pace

There is no single right policy

  • A 2-person team is not a 200-person team

  • Security-critical ops is not a prototype frontend

  • A regulated bank is not a startup hackathon

  • But you have to decide — silence is not a policy

Start the conversation.
Bring it to standup Monday.

If you remember one thing

You are not your code.

 

If your value was typing code faster than everyone else — this future is frightening.

If your value is understanding people, systems, tradeoffs, and problems —
this may be the most exciting moment of your career.

Thank you

Questions, disagreements, war stories — all welcome.

Four developers
The Enthusiast The Skeptic The Pragmatist The Quietly Lost

 

@maxandersen
https://xam.dk