Can generative AI replace a programmer?

I mostly get asked this by clients who are wondering whether they really need to hire an agency or whether they can “just do it with AI.” I get it — anyone who’s watched ChatGPT write a function in seconds has asked themselves that question.

Generative AI writes code reasonably well when the problem is well-defined and looks like something that already exists thousands of times on the internet: a contact form, a function that sorts a list, a typical component. That’s where it genuinely saves time, and at the agency we use it constantly for exactly that.

What it doesn’t do well yet is understand the full context of a real project: why that API returns data in such a strange format, what decision from two years ago still constrains how a given component can be touched, or what’s going to happen to performance when that client goes from 50 to 5,000 users. That requires someone who understands the business behind the code, not just the code.

There’s an example I use a lot: asking an AI to “fix a bug” in a large project without giving it any more context than the error message. Sometimes it gets it right. Many times it proposes a fix that makes the symptom disappear but leaves the real problem intact, or worse, introduces a new problem somewhere else in the code that nobody reviewed.

So, does it replace a programmer? Not the programmer who knows what they’re doing. It can replace, over time, the most mechanical and repetitive part of the work, and in fact it’s already doing so, which changes which skills are worth having. A developer who knows how to review, fix and decide which AI-generated code is worth using is worth more now than three years ago. One who just copies and pastes without understanding, isn’t.

If your business is considering doing without developers because of this, the question I’d ask is who’s going to take responsibility when something breaks in production on a Saturday night. That part, for now, is still human.