Why AI Will Not Replace You. The Artisan of the Day Is Dave Hicking.
With developers wondering if AI will take their jobs, Dave Hicking’s story at Laracon was all about what makes us human.
Before joining Laravel to run agency partnerships, Dave spent over a decade working at university libraries, where he saw firsthand how revolutionary technologies change the way an entire profession works. He went on to serve as the first PM at Tighten, lead technology at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library (the largest in the Western Hemisphere), returned to Tighten as Head of Client Services, and later worked at UserScape, the company behind LaraJobs.
This was Dave’s third Laracon talk, following appearances at Laracon AU and Laracon IN. More than emphasizing code generation or productivity boosts, he’s thinking about what happens when entire industries face existential questions about their future.
His talk at Laracon US 2025 was equal parts historical perspective and genuine belief in developers’ irreplaceable value. Like many Laravel Community members, Dave sees technology disruption not as a threat, but as an opportunity to return to first principles and lean into what makes us uniquely human.
Why AI Will Not Replace You: A Talk About the Future of Work
At Laracon US, Dave delivered a talk that reframed the entire AI conversation for developers. Drawing parallels to the existential crisis libraries faced when Google and Wikipedia emerged in 2004, he showed us that this story has been told before.
What Dave's talk revealed:
- History rhymes: When the internet threatened librarians in 2004, some put up barriers requiring librarian approval slips. Others adapted and found new ways to enable scholarship through digital archives, research workflows, and information literacy.
- Disruption is messy: Change always causes temporary displacement, but software continues to eat the world. AI will only accelerate that trend.
- Code is becoming cheap to create: When creating code is no longer the bottleneck, what becomes valuable? The human elements: taste, judgment, weird ideas, and the ability to care.
- We define the outcomes: AI can generate code, but it can't tell us what to build or why. Humans still decide what problems are worth solving.
- This is the pets.com era of AI: We're in the early, chaotic phase. Just like web development didn't end if you missed the late 1990s, it's not too late to embrace AI as a tool.
Dave's core message is: "AI can generate code, but it cannot generate taste. You have to be human to develop expertise, and without expertise, you cannot develop taste."
His challenge to the Laravel Community is to use AI to solve interesting problems that would otherwise be unattainable. Invent the unexpected and embrace what makes you human.
The talk ended with practical advice about working with AI: think of it like managing a team. You need to provide context, explain the problem clearly, and delegate thoughtfully. It's a different way of thinking, but one that uses our uniquely human ability to communicate, prioritize, and create meaning from chaos.
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