“Will I Be Replaced?” Revisited: An Exploratory Replication on AI Tool Perceptions with Software Professionals in Brazil
Resumo
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have rapidly entered professional software development, yet evidence on developers’ perceptions remains concentrated in international samples and was largely collected in the early, single-tool era of ChatGPT 3.5, before multi-tool and agent-assisted workflows became commonplace. This paper presents an exploratory conceptual replication of the survey by Kuhail et al. on programmers’ perceptions of AI tools, with the instrument translated into Brazilian Portuguese, updated to the current tool landscape, and administered to software professionals working in Brazil (18 valid responses). Combining descriptive statistics, exploratory Spearman correlations, and thematic analysis, we find frequent use and high perceived usefulness (4.50/5) under a deliberately assistive mode: reliability received the lowest trust rating and stood apart from an otherwise coherent positive-perception cluster. Perceived job-security threat reproduces the present-versus-future asymmetry of the original study (2.33 now vs. 3.06 in the future), and four themes converge on supervised assistive use, reshaping of the profession rather than replacement, and fundamentals-first education with AI literacy.
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