A recent article made the case that if everyone simply drove the speed limit, the United States could save millions of gallons of fuel every day. The research behind it is sound. The faster a vehicle travels, the harder it has to work against aerodynamic drag, and the more fuel it consumes. Slow down, and you’ll use less fuel. It’s a straightforward application of physics.
Reading the article, though, made me think about a different question. While changing driver behavior can certainly create savings today, is that where the biggest improvements have historically come from? Looking back over the past century, the answer seems fairly clear.
The largest gains have almost always come from better technology rather than expecting people to fundamentally change how they behave.
Better Machines Changed Driving
Modern vehicles are a perfect example. Today’s pickup trucks and SUVs often achieve fuel economy that would have been impressive for much smaller cars a few decades ago. That progress wasn’t driven by millions of people suddenly becoming more disciplined behind the wheel. It came from engineers building better engines, more efficient transmissions, improved aerodynamics, hybrid systems, regenerative braking, and increasingly intelligent software. The vehicles themselves became better at using energy efficiently.
The same pattern appears throughout the automotive industry. Safety has improved dramatically over the years, not because every driver became more attentive, but because technology continued to evolve. Airbags, anti-lock brakes, stability control, lane keeping assistance, adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance systems, and automatic emergency braking have all reduced accidents by making cars more capable of helping drivers make better decisions. We still value skilled drivers, but we also recognize that better machines improve outcomes for everyone.
That way of thinking extends far beyond the automotive world:
- Calculators didn’t replace mathematicians.
- Spreadsheets didn’t replace accountants.
- GPS didn’t eliminate professional drivers.
In each case, technology removed repetitive work, reduced unnecessary effort, and allowed skilled people to spend more of their time applying judgment instead of completing routine tasks.
AI Is Changing the Development Process
I believe we’re seeing the same shift with artificial intelligence.
Much of the public conversation around AI focuses on whether it will replace software developers. While it’s an understandable question, it may not be the most useful one. History suggests that transformative technologies rarely eliminate expertise. Instead, they amplify it by removing friction from the work.
Software development has always involved a balance between creative problem solving and repetitive execution. Developers spend time writing boilerplate code, searching documentation, debugging familiar issues, generating tests, reviewing pull requests, and moving information between systems. None of those tasks define what makes a great engineer, yet they often consume a significant portion of the day.
AI is beginning to change that equation.
Today’s tools can generate code, explain unfamiliar libraries, summarize documentation, identify potential bugs, draft tests, and automate many of the repetitive tasks that previously required hours of manual work. That doesn’t remove the need for experienced developers. If anything, it places even greater value on the skills that AI cannot easily replicate.
Judgment Still Matters
Knowing what to build is still more important than knowing how to build it.
Understanding a customer’s business, recognizing tradeoffs, designing maintainable systems, and making sound architectural decisions remain deeply human responsibilities. Those are the areas where experience continues to matter, and where the best engineers distinguish themselves.
The most successful development teams we’ve worked with aren’t using AI to avoid thinking. They’re using it to spend more time thinking about the problems that actually matter. Instead of dedicating hours to repetitive implementation, they can focus on product strategy, customer needs, software quality, and long-term maintainability. AI becomes another tool in the toolbox, much like modern engineering software or cloud infrastructure transformed development over the past two decades.
This is why the comparison to modern vehicles resonates. A professional driver still gets more out of a high-performance car than someone with very little experience. The technology raises the baseline for everyone, but expertise continues to determine who achieves the best results. AI is following a remarkably similar path. It makes developers more productive, but it doesn’t replace the judgment that separates good software from great software.
Better Tools Raise the Baseline
As engineers, we’ve always embraced better tools. Higher-level programming languages replaced machine code. Version control replaced manually copying files. Cloud platforms replaced managing physical servers. Automated testing replaced many tedious manual processes. Each advancement changed how software was built, but none diminished the importance of experienced engineers. They simply shifted where those engineers created the most value.
Artificial intelligence feels like the next step in that evolution. The biggest productivity gains won’t come from expecting developers to work harder or type faster. They’ll come from combining experienced people with increasingly capable tools that remove unnecessary friction from the development process.
Technology has consistently shown that it scales better than behavior alone. We still encourage safe driving, just as we still encourage good engineering practices. But history reminds us that the greatest leaps forward usually happen when we improve the tools people use every day.
That’s not just true for automobiles.
It’s becoming increasingly true for software development as well.