Writing a Business logic. Validated everything. Made the decisions.

Three weeks ago, our team hired a new junior developer. Fresh grad from a smaller college. $40K salary (we’re used to paying seniors $120K+).

As it was a starting phase so we gave him a **“learning task” **—

integrate Stripe payment gateway with webhook handling, subscription management, and edge cases.

Hey you! sorry man for not being consistent, I am building up the you-tube stuff! see you there “Yes Vritra”

Estimating — 1 week or may be 2 or may be he needs my help and I was ready and getting bored as no office politics here.. but you know what

He delivered in two days. With tests. With proper error handling and ask me to deliver to the staging.. and I was like

🕸️What Actually Happened!

At first, I thought he copied code from somewhere. Then I watched him work. He wasn’t copying. He was conducting.

His tech stack was not MERN, MEAN or all shits.. but** — CURSOR AI | CLAUDE | V0.dev**

The only work he did was —

Writing a Business logic. Validated everything. Made the decisions.

And suddenly, I realized something uncomfortable — All my experience just became 6 Months of Practice?

Let me show you the comparison that made me question my entire career.

Our Team’s Payment Integration Approach —

Approximate — **35 hours **of senior dev time

but Our ‘New Dev’ approach is —

8 hours only!

I pulled both implementations. Ran them side-by-side.

His code had** 214 lines across 2 files.** Our planned version — 847 lines across 6 files with three layers of abstraction.

Both worked perfectly. Both handled the same edge cases. Both had proper error handling.

But He shipped in 23% of the time.

🕸️Lets — The Agentic AI Workflow

I asked him to screen-share his entire process. Here’s what you & I can see —

You & Me (Traditional Developer) —

AI-Assisted Developer —

If you are thinking that AI writes better code. Naah!

It’s that AI eliminates the time spent on decisions that don’t matter.

He doesn’t spend 30 minutes debating whether to use a factory pattern. He prompts —

“Create a payment service with Stripe integration, include webhook handlers for subscription events.”

Gets a working implementation in 60 seconds. Spends his actual brain power on:

  • Business logic validation
  • Edge case identification
  • Security considerations
  • Testing strategy

The boilerplate? The interfaces? The folder structure? AI does that while he thinks about problems that actually matter.

🕸️But Dribbble Controversy

See, Designer requirement comes in when we want something very custom and your business need is actually a fast working website like NFT’s site and other advance Three.js built sites.

But Our designer spent 6 hours creating checkout page mockups. Professional. Beautiful. Custom. (I mean, Seriously?)

The new dev found a design reference online. Told v0.dev: “Recreate this with Tailwind and shadcn. Match our color scheme.”

And after 20 minutes — Pixel-perfect React components. Accessible. Responsive. Mobile-optimized.

“Users expect familiar patterns. Every hour I spend reinventing a login form is an hour I could spend on actual features.”

— lines by him.

I wanted to argue. But I couldn’t. Because he’s right.

💼Lets Analyze — (it’s real)

Project: E-commerce platform with vendor management.

Our Original Estimate —

  • 10 sprints (20 weeks)
  • $180K fixed bid
  • 3 senior developers

Actual Delivery (After New Dev Joined) —

  • 4.5 sprints (9 weeks)
  • Same $180K (contract was fixed)
  • 2 seniors + 1 junior with AI

Client’s Next Project Negotiation: “You did 10 sprints of work in 4.5 last time with AI. So this 8-sprint project should realistically take… 3.5 sprints?”

Our rates just got compressed by 55% :)

And the client isn’t wrong.

✅FACT Check

Okay lets talk limitations —

What AI does well —

What AI still sucks at —

When I reviewed his payment code in detail, I found something interesting.

The AI-generated scaffold used exponential backoff for webhook retries. Standard pattern.

He changed it to linear backoff.

**Why? **Because he read Stripe’s actual documentation. Their webhook system works better with linear backoff for certain retry scenarios. The AI didn’t know that context. He did.

That’s the difference —

AI gives you around 80% of the solution instantly but the last 20% is where actual engineering happens.

But here’s the problem for us mann! —

That 20% used to take 20% of the time. Now it takes 20% of the time, but the 80% takes 5% instead of 80%.

My value per hour just dropped by 60%. LMAO

📝NOTES

I spent the last three weeks learning his workflow.

Cursor AI + Claude for complex explanations + v0.dev for UI + Windsurf for debugging.

My initial reaction: “This feels like cheating.”

My reaction now: “This feels like I’ve been handicapping myself.”

Yesterday, I built a feature I estimated at 8 hours. Took me 2.5 hours with AI. I reviewed every line. Made decisions about complex logic. Validated edge cases.

But the boilerplate, the setup, the scaffolding? AI handled that while I focused on what actually mattered.

I’m not being replaced by AI. I’m being outcompeted by developers who use AI better than me.

Big difference. Period

Thank you 🖤

Thinking off building a community. Which platform i should choose?