If there’s one topic guaranteed to split a room full of developers, it’s AI. On one side, the enthusiasts — convinced this is the next major shift in computing, eager to tell you about it. On the other, the skeptics — equally convinced it’s a hype cycle that will quietly deflate like the ones before it.

The polarization is real and surprisingly sharp. But I think its root is deeper than people realize — and it has very little to do with AI itself.

Two kinds of love#

To understand the divide, it helps to think about what software development really involves. There are, at its core, two things going on at once.

There’s the journey: everything required to make the software — the architecture decisions, the algorithms, the debugging sessions, the refactoring, the craft of turning a vague idea into something that actually runs.

And there’s the destination: the finished product itself — the thing users touch, the problem you set out to solve, the value that ends up in someone’s hands.

Every developer who chose this profession loves both. Just in different proportions.

Destination-oriented developers tend to be more product-minded. They intuitively sense which features are missing, which ones nobody will ever use, which flows feel wrong. They’re drawn to simplicity — not because simple is easy, but because they understand that simplicity is what makes great products. The code is the means; the product is the point.

Journey-oriented developers lean the other way. They gravitate toward the algorithmic, the architectural, the elegant. They’ll spend an afternoon finding the right abstraction, the cleaner interface, the approach that makes the next developer’s life easier. The product validates the work; the work is the pleasure.

What AI actually does#

When you look at what AI brings to software development, one thing stands out: it dramatically shrinks the journey while accelerating arrival at the destination. A feature that once required hours of design thinking, careful implementation, and iterative refinement can now materialize in minutes. And if you want more destinations — more features, more products, more creative possibilities — AI removes the technical friction that once stood between the idea and the thing.

Seen through this lens, the polarization almost explains itself.

Developers who love the destination are thrilled. More output, more speed, more latitude. The constraints that slowed them down — the boilerplate, the obscure APIs, the mechanical work — are largely gone. AI is their answer.

Journey-oriented developers feel something closer to loss. What AI took from them isn’t the output — it’s the path. And often the path it chose isn’t the one they would have taken. It works, but it doesn’t feel elegant. It’s not theirs. As I explored in Why I code: it was never about the output, programming was always an intellectual game — the output was just proof that you’d played it well. When the game is handed to an AI, supervision is what’s left. And supervision was never the point.

A spectrum, not a binary#

None of this is black and white. Most developers love both the journey and the destination — the question is which one they love more. And when the gap is wide enough, they end up firmly in one camp.

Here’s a question worth sitting with: do you take more pleasure in designing a product, or in building one? And yes, I’m using two different words deliberately. Designing means thinking through what something should be — its shape, its behavior, its reason for existing. Building means making it happen — writing the code, assembling the pieces, watching it come to life. Both are part of software development, but they are not the same pleasure.

Your answer is probably a decent predictor of your relationship with AI.

Self-knowledge as navigation#

There’s no virtue in preferring the journey over the destination, or the other way around. Both kinds of developers are necessary. Both build great software.

But knowing which you are can change how you navigate what AI is doing to the profession. If you love the destination, you likely already feel liberated. If you love the journey, there are two paths worth considering.

One is to let the disruption be an invitation — maybe AI freeing you from the mechanical work leaves more room to appreciate the product, the user, the outcome. Maybe there’s more destination-love in you than you thought. The other, more natural instinct, is to seek out niches where AI can’t easily reach — problems complex enough, novel enough, or strange enough that the path still belongs to you.

Those niches exist. They’re real.

For now.