I can't see why it's a bitter prediction. It's an observation from all my life that boring, mind-numbing but high impact work makes the best money. Now smart people go into coding because it's a thrill, they enjoy doing it for the sake of it. Once this is no longer the case, these people will be out, and competition will become lower and there will be easier bucks to make.

For me, it’s the opposite, I had somewhat lost my love for my job as a developer between two JavaScript framework wars or wars between craftsmanship and agile. I think we now have the opportunity to return to addressing actual needs. For me, that has always been the driving force, an idea becomes a product. These agents have rekindled my desire to create things.

>Will programming eventually be relegated to a hobby?

I don't regard programming as merely the act of outputing code. Planning, architecting, having a high level overview, keeping the objective in focus also matters.

Even if we regard programming as just writing code, we have to ask ourselves why we do it.

We plant cereals to be able to eat. At first we used some primitive stone tools to dig the fields. Then we used bronze tools, then iron tools. Then we employed horses to plough the fields more efficiently. Then we used tractors.

Our goal was to eat, not to plough the fields.

Many objects are mass produced now while they were the craft of the artisans centuries ago. We still have craftsmen who enjoy doing things by hand and whose products command a big premium over mass market products.

I don't have an issue if most of the code will be written by AI tools, provided that code is efficient and does exactly what we need. We will still have to manage and verify those tools, and to do that we will still have to understand the whole stack from the very bottom - digital gates and circuits to the highest abstractions.

AI is just another tool in the toolbox. Some carpenters like to use very simple hand tools while other swear by the most modern ones like CNC.

this article precisely captures what i have been thinking recently. it’s really demotivating me.

To put the cost into context, spending $5 a day on tools is ludicrously cheap compared to paying minimum wage, let alone a programmer’s salary. Programming is only free if you already know how to code and don’t value your time.

Many of us do write code for fun, but that results in a skewed perspective where we don’t realize how inaccessible it is for most people. Programmers are providers of expensive professional services and only businesses that spread the costs over many customers can afford us.

So if anything, these new tools will make some kinds of bespoke software development more accessible to people who couldn’t afford professional help before.

Although, most people don’t need to write new code at all. Using either free software or buying off-the-shelf software (such as from an app store) works fine for most people in most situations. Personal, customized software is a niche.

Sure, we can throw code over the wall faster. Is that all that matters though? Just like in poetry, prose, images, etc, AI generates average or worse code. Sure, it may do the job and if your goal is to be average, fine, you should be worried. But has anyone with deep knowledge in programming and a desire to excel actually looked at AI-generated code and thought "omg, this is a work of art. it's so perfect and maintenance will be much easier than anything I could have done! plus, it matches all the requirements from the stakeholders"?

Don't get me wrong, it lets me be more productive sometimes but people that think the days of humans programming computers are numbered have a very rosy (and naive) view of the software engineering world, in my opinion.

>I just missed writing code.

Even before AI really took of that was an experience many developers, including me, had. Outsourcing has taken over much of the industry. If you work in the west, there is a good probability that a large part of your work is managing remote teams, often in India or other low cost countries.

What AI could change is either reducing the value of outsourcing or make software development so accessible that managing the outsourcing becomes unnecessary.

Either way, I do believe that Software Developers are here to stay. They won't be writing much code in any case. A software developer in the US costs 100k a year and writing software simply will never again be worth 100k year. There are people and programs who are much cheaper.

> Forty-six percent of the global population lives on less than $5 per day. In some countries, more than 90% of the population lives on less than $5 per day. If agentic AI code generation becomes the most effective way to write high-quality code, this will create a massive barrier to entry. Access to technology is already a major class and inequality problem. My bitter prediction is that these expensive frontier models will become as indispensable for software development as they are inaccessible to most of the world’s population.

Forty-six percent of the global population has never hired a human programmer either because a good human programmer costs more than $5 a day{{citation needed}}.

It's normal flow of things in the industry, isn't it? It used to be an important skill for a programmer to optimize constantly. Tasks like "We need to cut halfkilobyte at least!" were challenging, and satisfying puzzles. And today you open a news webpage, it takes 1.5Gib and who cares? Typing speed used to be an important skill too, and nowadays one can be a decent software developer using two fingers. Memorizing names, and parameters used to be extremely important until autocomplete, and autosuggest appeared. I can expand this list to a hundred points probably.

AI has made me love programming again. I can finally focus on the creative parts only.