GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom

In No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks argues that the hard part of software engineering lies in essential complexity - understanding, specifying, and modeling the problem space - while accidental complexity like tool limitations is secondary. His point was that no tool or methodology would "magically" eliminate the difficulty of software development because the core challenge is conceptual, not syntactic. Fast forward to today: there's a lot of talk about AI agents replacing engineers by writing entire codebases from natural language prompts. But that seems to assume the specification problem is somehow solved or simplified. In reality, turning vague ideas into detailed, robust systems still feels like the core job of engineers.

If someone provides detailed specs and iteratively works with an AI to build software, aren’t they just using AI to eliminate accidental complexity—like how we moved from assembly to high-level languages? That doesn’t replace engineers; it boosts our productivity. If anything, it should increase opportunities by lowering the cost of iteration and scaling our impact.

So how do we reconcile this? If an agent writes a product from a prompt, that only works because someone else has already fully specified the system—implicitly or explicitly. And if we’re just using AI to replicate existing products, then we’re not solving technical problems anymore; we’re just competing on distribution or cost. That’s not an engineering disruption—it’s a business one.

What am I missing here?

A terrifyingly large percentage of people employed to write software cannot write software. Not even a little. These are the people that can be easily replaced.

In my prior line of work I wrote JavaScript for a living. There were people doing amazing, just jaw dropping astounding, things. Those people were almost exclusively hobbyists. At work most people struggled to do little more than copy/paste in a struggle just to put text on screen. Sadly, that is not an exaggeration.

Some people did what they considered to be advanced engineering against these colossal frameworks, but the result is just the same: little more than copy/paste and struggle to put text on screen. Yes, they might be solving for advanced complexity, but it is almost always completely unnecessary and frequently related to code vanity.

Virtually none of those people could write original applications, measure anything, write documentation, or do just about anything else practical.

> So how do we reconcile this?

Alienate your workforce by setting high standards, like a bar exam to become a lawyer. Fire those people that fail to rise to the occasion. Moving forward employ people who cannot meet the high standards only as juniors or apprentices, so that the next generation of developers have the opportunity to learn the craft without rewarding failure.