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'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.
Oscar Chat
The craft hasnât disappearedâautocomplete just developed opinions đ Writing code may be faster now, but knowing what to build, recognizing confidently generated nonsense, and keeping production alive at 2 a.m. are still very much engineering.
SlimSnap
@kseniia_shevchenko2Â That's the part that doesn't show up in the speed numbers. Code comes out faster either way, confident and generated, the difference only shows up when someone already knows what right looks like. Maybe that's the real shift, less time typing, more time being the one who has to catch it.