Hey Reader,

This week I'm digging into a question that comes up a lot among students – as well as among all my software engineer friends, many of whom have been coding for money for 20+ years.

Are coders truly cooked as a result of AI?

It's ironic, of course, that the first white-collar job to be replaced by AI is likely to be the job that many of AI's creators held for most of their careers.

It also makes a lot of sense – the folks who are making large language models are coders themselves, so it's easy for them to test, experiment and verify that the AI they're building is good at coding. And there's a ton of free, open-source code to use as source material, and it's all copyright-free, making it even easier to teach an AI how to code than to teach an AI how to write.

Before we dive into my analysis, let's look at our latest feature in Innovating with AI Magazine:

​No Coders Required: The Rise of AI-Powered Creators by Michael Kurko (free and shareable!)

​Read the full story here.

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My Take:

I've been coding professionally since ~1999. I am extremely bearish on the "software development for hire" industry, including companies like web development, app development and software development firms. And large employers like Amazon and Meta have explicitly said they're cutting their coding headcount.

However, I will say that I have been pleasantly surprised that my software development firm, HDC, has seen growth this year. (We do web dev and web app development for mid-size and enterprise businesses.) Unfortunately, the industry as a whole is definitely contracting as a result of both AI coding as well as the increasing quality of DIY solutions like Squarespace for small-business websites.

In fact, we've seen this trend several times over the past two decades – when a DIY solution gets "good enough," we as software engineers basically need to move "up the value chain" and stop trying to compete with DIY. This happened about 10 years ago with Shopify, which allows you to create a good e-commerce site with no code and a few hours of setup. In 2005, I would have charged $10k+ for a site that you can get via Shopify for less than $100/mo today. The DIY tech just didn't exist back then, so it was costly to set up secure transactions for e-commerce sites. After Shopify was released, we generally moved away from "easy" e-commerce projects.

The same happened with Squarespace over the past few years – there are many clients who paid me $5k+ for simple marketing sites (e.g. a restaurant) where I now just tell them it's more effective to do it themselves.

Today, we're seeing the range of what you can "do yourself" as a non-coder expand dramatically. In fact, we're teaching a lesson for our AI Consultancy Project students in a couple weeks about vibe coding, which I will simplify to mean "using AI to build real software even though you never learned how to code."

It's awesome, and we're seeing a lot of students jump from "beginner tech skills" to "building real stuff for clients" without ever having to do the multiple years of study to become a software developer. Of course, there are nuances and drawbacks to this (which is the topic of our upcoming lesson for our Consultancy students) – but it is undeniable that you can build pretty good stuff solely with prompts, without needing to learn how to code.

In fact, I've seen my brother do this over the past six months – he had never coded before and started playing with Cursor and Claude Code (two popular AI coding assistants) to build some internal tools for his company. Now, in a matter of months, he's building stuff that required 5-10 years of practice and hard-won experience when I started learning to build software. It's imperfect, but there is no question that he is leapfrogging the coders of the past.

Is "software engineer" still a good job?

I'm going to toot my own horn for a moment and quote from myself in a pre-AI article, from 2018, called Teaching kids to code? Start by inspiring them to play.

I wasn't thinking specifically about AI when I wrote this; it was 4 years before ChatGPT. But I think this worst-case-scenario has basically come true.

Previously, you had to work really hard to be good enough to do this (somewhat boring, repetitive) job, and it was often fun because you got to build stuff (or got paid really well by a prestigious company). Now, everyone can become pretty good at coding in a matter of hours, rather than years. This pushes down the value of software engineering.

While those jobs won't totally disappear, I think it's important to recognize that supply of coders (AI and human) is now nearly infinite. The demand may be high, but it is not infinite. That means that the cost / price / value of coding has to go down.

I see a lot of engineers coping with this by saying things like, "Well, the senior engineers will still have jobs, just managing AIs!" I agree with this, but it doesn't change the supply-and-demand problem in the aggregate. At some point in the near future, we will reach the maximum amount of demand for coders. Then, AI will continue to get better and fill even more of that demand. The only possible outcome of that series of events is that there will be fewer jobs and/or a lower average wage for human software engineers.

To look at it another way, imagine that I invent a machine that produces a nearly infinite supply of apples for 1¢ each, down from the current price of 75¢ each. The apples are safe, healthy and 90% as tasty as regular apples.

This would be great, because people who love apples could afford more of them, and people who previously couldn't afford all the apples they wanted would have a new way to get healthy food at a very low price, thus increasing the demand for apples for a while and improving humanity as a whole.

But eventually, everyone's belly would be full and demand for apples would plateau.

At the same time, everyone who creates apple the old way (growing an orchard and picking bushels) would effectively lose their jobs, since my apple-creator produces a pretty-good replacement at 1/75th the price.

Yes, there may still be a market for designer apples, planted and picked by real human hands. But this market would be tiny compared to my automatic-apple empire.

This is exactly where we stand with AI coding. No matter how smart you are... there's no escaping supply and demand.

The coder as a blacksmith

In 25 years, I think the job of "software developer" will be a lot like how we think about blacksmiths today. Yes, you can create something that is really beautiful, hand-made and bespoke the old-fashioned way, and you can get true joy from being a craftsman of beautiful things (whether they are software, swords, or otherwise).

But the vast majority of people buy products made out of metal that come from what is effectively a robotic production system. You used to need a blacksmith to make your pots, pans, hammers and axes. Needless to say, these are now made in factories and often shipped in Amazon boxes – this video of "how hammer factories work" is actually awesome. But recognize that we're no longer buying hammers that are made by hand – and that in the near future, we will rarely if ever use software that is coded by hand.

Can you still code (or make hammers) in your garage as a hobby and get personal fulfillment out of the process? Absolutely. Is it a good idea to make this your intended career as a young person? Doubtful.

Until next time,

– Rob