This insightful post by Stephan Schwab where he shares a brief history of how we have dreamt of replacing developers and failed. But the pursuit of this dream has created enormous value.
Perhaps the recurring dream of replacing developers isn’t a mistake. Perhaps it’s a necessary optimism that drives tool creation. Each attempt to make development more accessible produces tools that genuinely help. The dream doesn’t come true as imagined, but pursuing it creates value.
COBOL didn’t let business analysts write programs, but it did enable a generation of developers to build business systems effectively. CASE tools didn’t generate complete applications, but they advanced our thinking about visual modeling. Visual Basic didn’t eliminate professional developers, but it brought application development to more people. AI won’t replace developers, but it will change how we work in meaningful ways.
The pattern continues because the dream reflects a legitimate need. We genuinely require faster, more efficient ways to create software. We just keep discovering that the constraint isn’t the tool—it’s the complexity of the problems we’re trying to solve.
Understanding this doesn’t mean rejecting new tools. It means using them with clear expectations about what they can provide and what will always require human judgment.
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