How do developers define their worth when code is written by AI?

Lately I’ve been in a few podcasts and interviews and one question came up almost every time: What is left for developers to care about or define themselves with when all the code is written by AI? Here is the quick answer: being a developer was never about writing code. Code is a tool to achieve the thing we really care about: solving problems. Every developer I know loves solving problems and when there aren’t any problems to solve, we invent them. This is the reason why so many frameworks and libraries exist. We take a coding solution we built and make it generic so that it can deal with whatever problem that is thrown at it. And then we lose interest and start all over again. Don’t get me wrong, writing code is great fun. Having witnessed and helped new languages and environments evolve and change from an OK concept to a platform almost every software solution relies on is also great. Squeezing the last bit of optimisation out of a script whilst keeping it understandable and…