TLDR: AI is an abstraction for coding. And like all abstractions, it never replaces the need for the underlying knowledge. The Theory There's an ongoing theory that AI will take most jobs, and definitely all software development jobs. I think this is highly exaggerated for a few reasons. In this post I want to look at one of the most basic ideas in software development that contradicts this. The Law of Leaky Abstractions This is a concept attributed to Joel Spolsky, who coined and explained it in this article , which states: All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. I would go a step further and say that "all abstractions are leaky"; the trivial ones are just naturally absorbed. This means that all abstractions attempt to hide some process from the person using them, and fail. To be honest, this tends to happen in edge cases, but it's usually a matter of time (or scale) until you bump into an edge.…