Developers don’t get paid to write code

Justin Dorfman, Open Source Community Manager at Sourcegraph, argues that developers are paid to solve problems, not write code — and that's precisely why AI won't replace them. He highlights how agentic AI depends on overlooked infrastructure like basic command-line tools (e.g., curl), and shares a concrete example of using an AI agent to close a six-month-old TC39 issue. He also notes that roughly 80% of open source projects go inactive, and that agentic AI could help revive stalled work. His daily toolkit includes Amp CLI, Ghostty, VS Code, and Zed, and he advocates for non-code contributions to open source as equally valid.