Post-AI Programming: Not Coding
I just got back home after spending a week visiting the CodeScene offices in Malmö, Sweden, and I came back with a bit of a renewed perspective on programming in the post-AI world.
It’s hard for a craftsman who has mastered their tools to give away their tools, because it feels like they are throwing away all the time investment put into mastering those tools. It even feels a little like their value is tied up in their tools, hence the attachment to the code that I write. I’ve worked really hard over a decade to get good at writing code.
Really though, tools change over time. A construction worker may have started out with a hammer, but nowadays they use nailguns. You get more done, faster. Was a construction worker concerned they would become irrelevant with the introduction of a nailgun? If the ability to operate a hammer was the only ability they had, perhaps, but most construction workers do more than that, so I doubt it.
Likewise, I do a lot more than just write characters to a screen. The code is just a tool I use to solve business problems, and the more senior I’ve gotten over the years, and the wider the net of experience I’ve amassed, the less is my value in producing code.
I’d say my value these days is probably mostly in understanding customers, their needs, understanding how we (whoever I work for) can provide for their needs, and solve their problems, all while also understanding our own business goals and constraints, to then be able to effectively plan, coordinate and deliver what the customer needs.
This requires me to be a good communicator, because I need to be able to talk about technical topics in a way that non-technical people understand. It requires me to be an approachable person, one who you’d actually like to talk to. It requires me to think in an abstract, tying together multiple pieces of hints and clues to form complex solutions. It requires me to be able to make complex solutions simple, by breaking them into logical segments. It requires a lot of things that are not writing code.
In other words, maybe post-AI programming is not writing code. It’s being a sort-of in-between a technical manager and a sales person. To be employed and continue making a high salary, you have to start providing a lot more value, because being able to just create software is no longer enough.
As the code creation part gets easier, the competition in the job market gets harder. As the competition in the job market gets harder, the salaries will get lower. As salaries will get lower, less people will want to do this job. If you do not have, do not want to learn, or don’t like the varied skills neccecary to be of value in the post-AI software development world, you’ll probably not get far.