What is 20 years of coding experience worth now?
I've been a front-end developer for more than 20 years now. For the last decade or so, most of my work has centered around Angular. I've spent a huge part of my career learning how to write better code, debug faster, understand architecture, recognize patterns, and generally become a more capable developer.
For a long time, that experience felt like a pretty clear advantage.
Now I’m not so sure what that advantage is supposed to look like.
AI has changed the way I work enough that I sometimes find myself wondering what 20 years of coding experience is actually worth when so much of the coding itself can now be done for me.
And depending on the day, I can feel really excited about that or pretty uneasy about it.
I Barely Write Code the Way I Used To
One of the strangest changes for me is that I rarely spend much time manually writing code anymore.
Most of the time, I’m essentially coding in plain English.
I’ll explain what I want to accomplish, let AI take a pass at it, review what it produced, and then continue refining it through conversation.
A few years ago, I probably would’ve hated that idea.
I used to enjoy being the person who could sit down and build something by hand. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing the APIs, understanding the framework, and being able to turn an idea into working code myself.
If I’m being completely transparent, I probably took some pride in feeling like I was better at that than a lot of other developers.
AI has changed that feeling quite a bit.
The interesting part, though, is that I don’t feel like my experience has become useless.
I feel like I’m just using it differently.
So What Are 20 Years of Experience Worth Now?
The AI can write the code.
What it can’t consistently do, at least in my experience, is know whether the code it wrote is actually the right code.
That’s where the experience still matters.
When AI gives me an implementation, I’m constantly evaluating it.
Does this fit the architecture?
Is this solving the actual problem?
Did it introduce unnecessary complexity?
Is there already something in the codebase we should be using?
What else does this change affect?
Is this going to create a problem six months from now?
Those questions aren’t really about syntax.
They’re about judgment.
And a lot of that judgment comes from years of building things, breaking things, maintaining things, refactoring bad decisions, and learning what tends to work in real applications.
In that sense, AI hasn’t made my experience irrelevant.
It may actually be forcing me to rely on the parts of that experience that matter most.
AI Works Best for Me in Small Chunks
I’ve also found that the way I use AI matters a lot.
I see plenty of demos where someone gives an agent a large feature, walks away, and comes back to a finished implementation.
That hasn’t really been my experience.
What works best for me is keeping the tasks small.
I’ll give AI one focused piece of work, review it, make sure it’s right, and then move on to the next piece.
In a lot of ways, it’s not that different from how I would have built the feature myself.
I’m still thinking through the structure.
I’m still deciding what should happen next.
I’m still controlling the direction.
The difference is that AI is doing much more of the implementation work along the way.
That workflow has been surprisingly effective for me.
It’s faster, but more importantly, it can make me more thorough.
Sometimes I’ll ask AI to refactor something and it’ll notice another related area that needs to change that I might not have remembered immediately.
That part is genuinely useful.
I’m not suddenly 100 times more productive, but I can definitely get more done.
And in some ways, I actually enjoy the work more now.
AI Feels a Lot Like a Very Fast Junior Developer
The closest comparison I can make is that working with AI sometimes feels like working with an incredibly fast junior developer.
You explain what you need.
It goes off and does it almost immediately.
Then you look at what it came back with and say:
No, not quite.
Let’s do this differently.
Don’t add that.
Use this pattern instead.
You send it back, and a few seconds later it returns with another version.
That’s incredibly powerful.
But it also explains why I still don’t feel comfortable handing over large parts of a production application and simply trusting the result.
The speed is there.
The judgment isn’t always there.
The Big Agent Workflows Still Haven’t Clicked for Me
This is one area where I still feel like I might be missing something.
I see developers talking about multi-agent environments, autonomous coding workflows, and handing entire features over to AI.
I’ve tried versions of that.
Usually, I end up with a massive code review.
The AI touches more things than I expected. It makes architectural decisions I wouldn’t have made. It introduces abstractions I don’t necessarily want.
At that point, figuring out whether everything is correct can take longer than I expected.
So for now, I keep coming back to smaller, controlled iterations.
Maybe that changes.
Maybe other teams have already figured out much better agent workflows than I have.
If that’s you, I’d genuinely like to know what you’re doing differently.
What tools are you using?
How much context are you giving the agents?
How much review is still required afterward?
And are you really trusting these systems with large production features?
I’m interested in the workflows people are actually using every day, not just the ones that make for an impressive demo.
Do Experienced Developers Still Matter?
Right now, I think we do.
But I also think the reason we matter is changing.
Being able to write code quickly may become less valuable.
Knowing what should be built, how it should fit together, whether the implementation is good, and what risks are hiding inside it may become much more important.
Maybe the job shifts away from writing every line yourself and more toward directing, evaluating, and shaping what gets built.
I don’t know exactly where this ends.
And I don’t want to pretend that I do.
There are days when AI makes me incredibly excited about what I’m able to accomplish.
There are other days when I look at how fast all of this is moving and wonder what it means for the career I’ve spent more than two decades building.
For now, though, I still feel needed.
I still feel like the experience I’ve accumulated matters.
I’m just using it in a very different way than I expected.
That’s how I feel today, anyway.
Ask me again in a few weeks. 😂
