The Visual Studio Skeptic
Twenty years ago, I was working on Visual Studio at Microsoft when I had an encounter that still sticks with me today. I was manning a booth at a trade show, demonstrating new IDE features in Visual Studio 2005, when a developer approached me with an unusual complaint.
‘Visual Studio has gotten too good at code generation,’ he said, dead serious. ‘You need to cut it out because building data access objects is what I do.’
I thought he was joking. Here was someone essentially arguing that Microsoft should make its tools less capable so he could keep doing boring, repetitive work. When I suggested that these automation features would free him up to focus on more interesting, higher-value problems, he wasn’t having it.
I think about that developer often these days, especially as we’re witnessing what might be the most significant shift in software development since IntelliSense was first added to Visual Studio. The parallels are striking: just as that skeptical developer worried that automated data access would eliminate his job, today’s developers express similar concerns about AI coding assistants.
The argument then was familiar: “If the computer can generate my data access code, what value do I bring?” The argument now sounds eerily similar: “If Claude or Copilot can write my functions, what’s my role?”
