From Full Stack to Full Prompt: The Accidental Evolution of Developers

Author: Kristoffer Dave Tabong | July 15, 2025

A mildly unhinged but painfully honest look at modern development.

In the golden age of AI-assisted everything, developers have evolved. We’re not just writing code anymore—we’re whispering to language models, babysitting generative output, and questioning our careers between prompts.

Here’s a rundown of what “coding” looks like in 2025:

1. StackOverflow? No Thanks. I Have GPT.
   Why Google error messages when AI can summarize five outdated answers for you?
   Of course, the punchline is that you still end up on StackOverflow—just with more steps and a wrong solution baked in.
2. AI-Written Code No One Understands.
   It’s elegant. It works.
   And no one on the team has any idea how it does what it does.
   Welcome to Schrödinger's repo: both functional and incomprehensible at the same time.
3. Prompt-Driven Development (PDD).
   Forget TDD. Forget Agile. Welcome to the new methodology:
   Ask ChatGPT.
       Copy.
       Paste.
       Deploy.
       Pray.
4. Debugging AI Code is its Own Genre of Suffering.
   You: “Why is this function breaking?”
   AI: “As an AI language model, I am not sure.”
   You: “Cool. Very helpful.”
5. AI Suggests Features Nobody Asked For
   You needed a dark mode toggle.
   AI gave you blockchain integration, a crypto tipping jar, and an NFT profile badge.
   The future is now, and it’s full of features you’ll spend a sprint removing.
6. Pair Programming With a Machine That Gaslights You
   AI: “Would you like me to optimize that loop?”
   You, after 12 hours of failed builds: “Please. Just. Leave it alone.”
   Every suggestion feels like passive-aggressive performance review.
7. The Client Thinks It’s Just a Button Press
   “You have AI. Can’t you ship this in, like, 10 minutes?”
   Yes. And in return, I’ll invoice for 10 hours of existential crisis.
8. Junior Devs vs. AI: Who’s Really Training Who?
   Juniors fear being replaced.
   In reality, the AI is quietly learning from their commits.
   Soon it will start naming variables fixThisLater_final.
9. Vibe Coders in the Wild
   The modern dev stack:
   5% writing actual code
   15% prompting ChatGPT
   80% overthinking life choices
10. TL;DR — We’re Not Developers Anymore. We’re AI Whisperers.
    The codebase is haunted. The pull requests are generated. The future is half machine, half markdown, and we’re all just trying to stay one prompt ahead of disaster.

In the end, this isn’t just about AI tools writing code. It’s about how fast the developer role is evolving into something stranger and more unpredictable. We’re no longer just engineers — we’re translators, negotiators, and often reluctant curators of machine-generated logic. The line between creativity and automation is blurring, and the challenge now is not just building things that work, but understanding how and why they work when written by something else. Coding today is less about typing and more about navigating a conversation with the machine. Whether that’s progress or chaos depends on how well we adapt — and how honest we are about what’s being built in our name.