The gate is open, and that is fine
My LinkedIn feed this week had a senior engineer with 22 years behind him announcing that he refuses to use AI and is leaving the industry. Software, he wrote, is an art, and the artist is gone.
I understand the feeling. I do not agree with any of it.
AI is here to stay
This is the easy part. Nobody is putting it back. Every editor has it, every team uses it, and the people who said it was a fad two years ago are now arguing about which model is best at Rust lifetimes. Refusing it is not a principled stand. It is like refusing compilers in 1960 because real programmers write in octal.
And it does make programming easier. Not a little easier. The boilerplate is gone. The “what was the flag for that again” is gone. Reading an unfamiliar codebase went from a week to an afternoon. Writing the tenth CRUD handler, the migration, the test scaffolding, the serde glue: all of that is now a sentence. The time I used to spend typing I now spend deciding.
It was never an art
Here is the part people do not like hearing. Programming was never an art or a craft in the way it got sold to us. It was a job with a lot of typing in it, wrapped in a story that made the typing sound sacred.
Look at what the “craft” actually consisted of most days:
- remembering syntax
- remembering which library does what
- knowing the incantation to make the build pass
- knowing which Stack Overflow answer is wrong
- knowing the unwritten rules of a particular codebase
None of that is art. It is recall. It is tribal knowledge. It was valuable because it was scarce, and it was scarce because it took years of exposure to absorb. That is the definition of a moat, and moats are built to keep people out.
It was gatekept
I came into this as an accountant. No CS degree, no internship pipeline, no friend at a big company. I taught myself, shipped my first production code in 2019, and have been writing Rust for a living for years now. I know exactly what the gate looked like from the outside.
It looked like leetcode interviews that tested memorised algorithms nobody uses. It looked like “you are not a real programmer unless” followed by whatever the speaker happened to learn first. It looked like code review that was about taste and status more than correctness. It looked like forums where a beginner’s question got a link to the docs and a sneer. It looked like a whole culture that treated not knowing something as a character flaw.
A lot of people never got through that. Not because they could not think clearly about systems, but because nobody would sit with them through the boring part. Now something will. Patiently, at 2am, without making them feel stupid. That is not the death of programming. That is the first time it has been properly taught at scale.
Coding is for everyone now
An accountant can build the tool their team actually needs. A biologist can write the analysis pipeline without waiting six months for a developer. A kid in a village with a cheap laptop can build a game and understand why it works, because they can ask why. Somebody’s mum can automate the spreadsheet she has been hand-editing for ten years.
Some of that code will be bad. So was mine. So was yours. Bad code written by someone who is now able to write code is a better world than no code written by someone who was told it was not for them.
What is actually left
People will say: fine, but someone still has to know what they are doing. Yes. Someone has to decide what to build, notice when it is wrong, and keep it running when it is under load at 3am. I write the part that has to stay up, and that part has not gone anywhere.
But that is judgment, not a priesthood. Judgment comes from building things and watching them break, and AI lets far more people build far more things, which means far more people get to learn it. The bar for getting in went down. The bar for being good did not. That is exactly how it should be.
A new world, not a worse one
The engineer leaving the industry is right that something ended. What ended was the idea that being able to write code made you special. I do not miss it. The interesting problems are still interesting. The systems still have to work. There are just more of us now, and the ones who arrived late do not have to apologise for it.
The gate is open. Come in.