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Do programmers even feel like programmers anymore?

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Saw a post from an 8-year dev this week. He said any junior with an agent now matches his output, and he feels no pride left in it. It got huge, because a lot of people quietly feel the same.

I read it from the other side. I'm a designer, not an engineer. For years "can you build this" meant "find someone technical and pray they stay interested." Usually they didn't. AI took the thing that hurt that dev and handed it to me.

Same shift. Loss from one seat, freedom from another.

I'm shipping a Mac app solo right now, as someone who can't write a backend from scratch. Two years ago that was a joke.

So I'm curious about the makers here. If you build for a living, does it still feel like your craft, or like something else now? Loss or relief?

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I can understand why experienced developers feel conflicted. At the same time, it's amazing to see more designers and solo founders finally able to bring their ideas to life.

 That's the half nobody in these threads talks about. I'm a designer, building was never my blocker, finding a builder was. Not anymore.

Product designer here. I can't speak for developers, but for me, this is something else. First time shipping my own product.

I was a junior developer years ago before transitioning to design. I can confidently say it's so much easier to build your own thing today. Ridiculously easier than the pre-AI era.

The product I'm building now, I've been thinking about it for 1.5 years. Last month I finally had the bandwidth to focus on it as a side project. I'm amazed at what's possible.

what are you building ?

  A screenshot tool that hands coding agents structured data instead of a flat image, so they stop editing the wrong element.

it still baffles me what some of the chatbots return as edits

 The confidently wrong ones are the worst. It edits something you never asked for, says done and now you're debugging a change you didn't want.

The definition of a 'maker' is definitely shifting from how to build to what to build. While it feels like a loss of traditional craftsmanship for some, it’s an incredible equalizer for creators, designers, and visionaries who can now bring ideas to life solo. The craft hasn't disappeared; the focus has just shifted from syntax to strategy and system architecture.
It’s same as Movie makers when they had to compete with random YouTuber

Coming from the enterprise AI side, I've watched this play out with our own engineering team too. The syntax-level stuff got faster. What got harder, and honestly more valuable, is knowing when an agent-generated architecture will hold up under real production load vs just looking clean in a demo. That judgment doesn't come from writing more code, it comes from having shipped things that broke and understanding why. AI made the floor higher for everyone, but it also made the ceiling harder to see.

I kind of feel that the playing field has been leveled, as no one has yet mastered these tools. But also I think that the intuition about good and bad technical choices is still valuable, as only with experience you can validate the AI output. 9/10 times it is correct, but (at least currently) we still need human in the loop to catch it. Some mistakes such as not backing up or leaking sensitive prod data and are still irreversible.

Personally I feel pressure to succeed, but also feel empowered to maintain larger software systems than ever as a solo dev.

Agree with the "principles did not change, tools did" framing. For me the craft moved up a layer: less time typing syntax, more time deciding what to build, reviewing what the AI produced, and debugging the subtle things it got confidently wrong. That last part is still very much programming, arguably the hardest part. What I had to relearn is judgment, since the AI will happily take you down a plausible wrong path, so knowing when to stop and question it is the real skill now. Do you find the fundamentals easier or harder to keep sharp when the tool writes the first draft?

I'm on my second product built mostly with agents and the pride moved somewhere else. I used to be proud of the code. Now the code is table stakes and I'm proud of the judgment calls, what not to ship, which agent output to throw away, the eval harness that catches the model being confidently wrong. That work is invisible in a diff, which I think is why it reads as loss. The 8-year dev being matched by a junior with an agent is only true for the part of the job that was always going to be automated.

I think it's both. AI has definitely changed what "being a programmer" feels like, but it hasn't removed the need for good engineering.

Writing code is easier than ever. Figuring out what to build, reviewing AI output, and making everything work together is still the hard part. The craft is shifting, not disappearing.

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