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 Nolan Lawson on February 7, 2026 at 11:22 AM
I used to think this is true, but I’ve come to believe the next step is to have AI code reviewers. (And refactorers, and security auditors, and performance benchmarkers, etc.) I cover this a bit in AI tribalism. This is the future that projects like Ralph and Gas Town are pointing toward.
If you’re right and we’re staring down the barrel of a civilizational collapse, then I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I don’t think it changes my conclusion much. If we’re due for a reshuffling of job titles then I have no idea what comes next, but it probably looks very different from the past.
Posted by Michael A Breeden on February 7, 2026 at 1:22 PM
Who said civilization collapse? The last time something like this happened was the invention of the printing press. It made a mess, but did not cause civilization collapse. You either need to fix capitalism or replace it. Both things can be done, but really you need to understand what capitalism is. Capitalism, meaning using capital as a tool of production, is needed in all systems from theocracies to monarchies to democracy to socialism. The thing is that “capitalism” has been given another meaning: ownership. It is the reason for the term “ownership class”. It is is easy to see the problem with that because then capital is used as a means of control as a bludgeon or to buy the law. The end result is wealth concentration like we see today. Automation will just make that more true. Wealth concentration will make that more true., Then when the enough of the wealth is controlled by the ownership class that families are unaffordable, the system changes, either by adjustment of law and social contract or the pitchforks come out. Many of the zillionaire class have been saying for years that taxes have to be higher. The thing is that the ownership class isn’t as much the problem, many of them create wealth or guide it to production by capital investment. Unfortunately, part of the ownership class is the “control class”. The ones that want to use wealth as a method of control are exhibiting dominance instinct, which has no off switch. That is the “control class”. They are the ones that have bought the law and fight for control of the working classes. They dominate wealth to do it and are the reason greed can be such a danger, not because of desire for wealth, but desire for control. Wealth is how they gain control. Somehow their control must be removed. It is best if it is done by law, that is taxation, because that preserves order. Nations, businesses and families thrive in order and investment. Historically though, what has happened is that people do not have the “wealth”, the resources, to survive due to Capital Accumulation, and the pitchforks come out – bad for everyone. That control class will call any attempt to limit their control “communism”.
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 Nolan Lawson on February 7, 2026 at 11:33 AM
I agree with a lot of what you said. Claude currently produces a lot of duplicate, verbose code, which is ironic because this is exactly what makes life hard for the next agent. But as I mentioned in another comment, I think this can be solved by additional steps of AI code reviewers, AI bug hunters, AI tech-debt-payer-downers, etc. I’ve already started using this technique in my work, and it shocks me how throwing more AI at the problem really does solve it. This is why Gas Town and Ralph scare me so much – if you’re trying to one-shot or one-conversation everything, you’re going to produce junk, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible not to produce junk.
When the tech debt catches up, it’s definitely going to be interesting! See my essay The collapse of complex software. The smart companies won’t wait for this to happen, but I do think many will.
Regulation is maybe the only thing that can stop this future; you’re right. I do think though that the energy costs will go down over time, since there’s every incentive to build more efficient models and hardware (we’re still reusing chips meant for gamers, recall). I have a coworker who uses Kimi K2.5 which can run on your own hardware if you want, although he uses a service since it’s faster. I expect though that we’ll run into a Jevons Paradox where even if the energy costs go down, we’ll just use more of it, so who knows how high the energy bill will go.
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.
Posted by Justin Van Winkle on February 7, 2026 at 11:31 AM
They can write code better than you or I can — no they can’t, they can code fast, and maybe they can code better than you, but they haven’t passed me quite yet. Good luck to you.
Posted by Yann on February 7, 2026 at 11:36 AM
“I don’t celebrate the new world, but I also don’t resist it.”
This part really sadden me the most…
Posted by findingscheme on February 7, 2026 at 11:54 AM
LLMs are not better at programming than me. If they were, I wouldn’t be inspecting their output with a fine-toothed comb, I’d be rubber stamping it. I wouldn’t be constantly amending Markdown files telling them not to do things no experienced programmer would do. If you are mourning this craft, why are you choosing to play into a false narrative crafted by billionaires trying to secure an exit before the bubble bursts?
Posted by Nolan Lawson on February 7, 2026 at 12:30 PM
I hear you, but please read my other replies in these comments.
Posted by Roamer on February 7, 2026 at 1:20 PM
if you’re suggesting the answer to crappy AI code is more AI reviewers then maybe you’re part of what’s making it inevitable. people who are willing to accept more bad food than less good food. people who judge code by the kilo.
Posted by Morty on February 7, 2026 at 12:46 PM
These LLMs we see nowadays have lots of errors (e.g., lack of memory), and they couldn’t be fixed totally even in 10 years unless they figure out a new algorithm, a new primitive solution; Indeed it would take years for AI researchers and engineers to practically invent a brand new AI model that could really beat humans at any intellectual skill. That would be the AI that we should be scared of.
And yes, perhaps lots of us are going to have a bad ending.
Posted by George Dorn on February 7, 2026 at 1:55 PM
Yeah, it’s easy to underestimate just how much the LLM jump was completely unexpected, unplanned for, and, critically, unrepeatable. That first jump was huge, even on consumer-grade hardware, compared to what was before. But every time we 10x the size of the model (or the number of co-working models), we don’t get anywhere near 10x improvement. So the tech sector is spending obscene amounts of money for each modest increment, and the diminishing returns are already underwater. And that’s just training, nevermind the cost of hardware and execution…
There are some interesting developments around the edges, but the big companies are aiming mostly at more data and larger models, and training for benchmarks to encourage investment, and that way is a dead end.
Posted by Adam Stankiewicz on February 7, 2026 at 12:56 PM
We’re none and all of these now, as collective, but I hear you. I am alive and experience very things you say. Hearbreaking
Posted by nathan7 on February 7, 2026 at 2:13 PM
i want puke on your face after ive read “They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.”
Posted by I on February 7, 2026 at 2:40 PM
Yeah, look, I sympathise with the existential panic – I feel it too – but… we’re just not there yet. In fact I don’t think we’re ever going to be. The ‘synthetic ceiling’ is real.
Posted by Dahmonium on February 7, 2026 at 2:49 PM
man, i am feeling this and mourn with you.
almost 47 and as a developer seen alot that came and went. this thing is different and too big to ignore or fight against. true, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. but the mourning is not only for my soon to be archaic craft. i also mourn for us as humans. Our crafts are the first victims of this new apex predator.