Why Developers Feel Like Spectators in the Age of AI Coding

There is a conversation happening quietly in engineering teams around the world. Developers are shipping more code than ever before, pull requests are merging faster, and backlogs are shrinking at unprecedented rates. Yet behind this surge in output, many experienced engineers report a growing unease-a sense that, for all the productivity, something essential has been lost. The question is not whether AI coding tools work. They do. The question is whether the developer is still the one doing the work. The Craftsman and the Machine Software development, at its core, has always been an act of creation. The engineer who solves a particularly thorny algorithmic problem, designs an elegant data model, or architects a system that gracefully handles failure - these are acts of genuine intellectual authorship. The satisfaction they produce is not incidental; it is the primary reward mechanism that sustains long careers in a demanding field. When an AI assistant generates that solution in secon