I didn’t ask for this and neither did you.
I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it.
I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production.
And yet here we are. The worst fact about these tools is that they work. They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.
You could abstain out of moral principle. And that’s fine, especially if you’re at the tail end of your career. And if you’re at the beginning of your career, you don’t need me to explain any of this to you, because you already use Warp and Cursor and Claude, with ChatGPT as your therapist and pair programmer and maybe even your lover. This post is for the 40-somethings in my audience who don’t realize this fact yet.
So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike. Eventually your boss will start asking why you’re getting paid twice your zoomer colleagues’ salary to produce a tenth of the code.
Ultimately if you have a mortgage and a car payment and a family you love, you’re going to make your decision. It’s maybe not the decision that your younger, more idealistic self would want you to make, but it does keep your car and your house and your family safe inside it.
Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it.
We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.”
I don’t celebrate the new world, but I also don’t resist it. The sun rises, the sun sets, I orbit helplessly around it, and my protests can’t stop it. It doesn’t care; it continues its arc across the sky regardless, moving but unmoved.
If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me. We are the last of our kind, and those who follow us won’t understand our sorrow. Our craft, as we have practiced it, will end up like some blacksmith’s tool in an archeological dig, a curio for future generations. It cannot be helped, it is the nature of all things to pass to dust, and yet still we can mourn. Now is the time to mourn the passing of our craft.
Read the Tea Leaves 
Posted by Michael A Breeden on February 7, 2026 at 9:02 AM
Well, there is still the problem that the code must be reviewed by a senior developer. It just needs to be and probably always will be. So the question is how of people get to be senior developers if the AIs van doo all the entry level stuff just fine.
Really, it is far more than that. Our capitalism economy is dependent on labor. The Economic Loop: Labor->Wages->Income->Consumption->Revenue for company … back to labor All parts are needed for economy, a system that was built. Capital will always want to replace labor, to cut costs, but that will break the economy. Capitalism self destructs. Survival is not built into corporations, mostly short term profit and competitive advantage. Expect: Acceptance, then Panic, then re-branding (cognitive workers are essential), then protection (bail out and regulation). When automation becomes a threat to order by embarrassing the cognition workers (and company officers). When recommendations from AI out perform CEOs, lawyers, etc. Then who gets bailed out?
I’m pretty far along at solving this problem, but it will take a little longer. It is a far larger problem than it looks. The real problem, ultimately, will probably be over production.
Posted by George Dorn on February 7, 2026 at 9:37 AM
“This is inevitable” is industry propaganda, though. This is far from inevitable.
First, it is entirely likely that the better models simply cannot be economically viable without a technological breakthrough reducing energy use and hardware costs, and when the giant pool of free investment money finally runs out and subsidies are ended, that harsh truth will crush the coding agent market.
Second, we are generating tech debt at a rate faster than any time in history. Back in 2007, Greg Jorgensen wrote “Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming.” It was meant as satire at the time, but read that and tell me it doesn’t perfectly describe how Claude writes code. We’re fighting a losing battle trying to keep code quality high; there was already pressure to compromise (thus the celebration of “10x devs”) and most orgs are going to be willing to make that compromise if it lets them ship software on time for once. What happens when that tech debt finally catches up?
Third, regulation is still not impossible. Hard to imagine in the current political situation, but when the pendulum swings back and everybody’s electricity bill has doubled, the political will to put an end to the industry’s externalities might materialize.
And all of that is assuming this investment bubble, 17x that of the dotcom era, somehow doesn’t pop. Who’s going to pay to run the models if it does?
I say all this as someone who has used Anthropic’s models daily for the last six months, both personally and professionally, who works at a YC-backed startup that was funded specifically because of the AI pitch deck. I’ve hand-written maybe a hundredth of the code I’ve committed in that time. I see the potential in the tools, but the industry is nowhere near ready to handle the level of deployment we have now, and neither are the economy, the power grid, or the climate. My only hope is that in the aftermath of the upcoming crises, we take a long hard look at the dangers and start focusing on mitigation, not expansion.
Posted by Wim on February 7, 2026 at 10:03 AM
I’m happy that I’m no longer in the game. I can enjoy my level of knowledge and nostalgia.