2023-03-28

2 min read

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AI won't take your job

Why I'm not at all concerned about AI taking my programming job.

Generally, I’m optimistic about the future. I spend almost zero time worrying about AI taking my programming job. Many other folks are apprehensive about it, which seems normal. Perhaps, more pessimistic people see genuine innovation and get nervous about their jobs. Those people are well-represented in the conversation, and it’s worth reading and thinking about what they have to say.

code is not the important part

First, writing code is the least interesting and least important part of my job as a developer. What I actually do is understand requirements. The actual coding is an abstraction around understanding requirements. The need for someone who understands what a business person requests is not going away. And the need for a person to have agreement upon before building a solution? That’s not going away either.

backlogs are incredibly long

There are more features to build. So many. Probably the future looks more like deciding what not to build than what to build. The amount of products and features that are not built is probably a decade worth of work at least. That’s before creative destruction. That’s before new ideas. That’s just what we have left. So even if AI is coming for my job, we have a while.

software is bad

It’s god awful. It’s worse than you think. It’s TERRIBLE. If anything we’re going to make more of it. Way more of it. And it will be bad. Really bad. The UX will suck. The SQL queries will be slow. We’ll have bad data models and messy API endpoints. You know what that means? We’ll need people fixing it. AI isn’t going to take my job. I’ll just be working with AI to fix the garbage we made last year.