Copyright, Dread, and Silicon Valley Shenanigans
Half of published novelists think AI going to replace them according to a report from The University of Cambridge.
I want to clarify that. They’re worried that AI will replace them rather than “augment” their work. Their work is already being hoovered up by Large Language Models (LLMs, not sentient “AI”) without consent, credit or cash.
If that doesn’t sound like software development in 2026, I don’t know what does.
Writing Is Dead
They say that there is no harm in writers using AI, and around a third do but I’m not so sure. When you’ve written code with AI assistance it’s often difficult to understand what “your” code is doing afterwards, and bugs creep in.
I don’t think it’s different to writing (as someone who is typing right now). Inspiration for creative pursuits might come at any time, and you need to be ready to receive it. That means ChatGPT on one tab and YouTube on another isn’t the best condition for creativity. If you want something human, messy and meaningful the machine is likely to get in the way.
That said, it might just be too late for novelists. Almost all of them (97%) say they’re “extremely negative” about AI writing full novels. Because creative professionals want to be creative, like good coders want to code.
It’s time for developers to take note and take action. AI isn’t just writing unit tests and stubbing out controllers. It’s already fixing bugs, drafting features, and reviewing PRs (often faster than humans do, because AI doesn’t spend 90% of the time on Slack complaining about the things that I fill this blog with).
What if?
I don’t know what would happen if we all pulled together and said “enough”. Writers, customer service agents and (yes) software developers. If we all said we won’t use AI, we won’t feed the machine with our work to be trained on (a euphemism for steal if ever I heard one) and we didn’t consume AI slop. Couldn’t this be stopped?
We are changing the nature of creativity and content. Worse, we are changing the nature of human work. The dark fact is that human-written novels could become luxury items, but human-written code will likely have no value.
The Reputational Problem Nobody Talks About
That’s why companies are taking on fewer and fewer junior developers. The tightening market means there are few career entry points, and companies are starting to go “lean” with their software developer population.
We’re heading toward a two-tier tech world.
• AI-assisted developers who deliver faster and leaner (with a smaller headcount).
• Human-only devs who are artisan coders building high-integrity systems for banks, governments, and high-risk industries.
We’re just there for the accountability aspect, much like writers are only there for the branding of their names. For books it’s only a matter of time until there are AI authors (with human names), for software developers it’s a matter of time until we can make AI accountable for development decisions.
Humans need to be better than AI, just to break even.
Conclusion
According to the Cambridge study, authors worry AI can’t understand what it means to be human. That it might write grammatically correct sentences with zero soul. That fiction will become blander, more formulaic, and more stereotypical.
If you’ve ever worked on a team where creativity got outsourced to “the process”, you’ve had a preview of what AI could do to software development. It’s not nice, it’s not pretty but it can reduce the cost base of software development (so there’s that).
In a few years good luck finding devs who can think outside the prompt. The next generation of software developers might not know how software is really made at all (while they are making it).
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.
The Secret Developer shirks accountability for their shoddy code, even though that’s the only thing that they have left.