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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/...6548&user_id=c383821527c441214d07ce6e4a6ba12a
This vertiginous shift threatens to stir up some huge economic consequences. For decades, coding was considered such wizardry that if you were halfway competent you could expect to enjoy lifetime employment. If you were exceptional at it (and lucky), you got rich. Silicon Valley panjandrums spent the 2010s lecturing American workers in dying industries that they needed to “learn to code.”
Now coding itself is being automated. To outsiders, what programmers are facing can seem richly deserved, and even funny: American white-collar workers have long fretted that Silicon Valley might one day use A.I. to automate their jobs, but look who got hit first! Indeed, coding is perhaps the first form of very expensive industrialized human labor that A.I. can actually replace. A.I.-generated videos look janky, artificial photos surreal; law briefs can be riddled with career-ending howlers. But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it’s worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose.
You might imagine this would unsettle and demoralize programmers. Some of them, certainly. But I spoke to scores of developers this past fall and winter, and most were weirdly jazzed about their new powers.
This vertiginous shift threatens to stir up some huge economic consequences. For decades, coding was considered such wizardry that if you were halfway competent you could expect to enjoy lifetime employment. If you were exceptional at it (and lucky), you got rich. Silicon Valley panjandrums spent the 2010s lecturing American workers in dying industries that they needed to “learn to code.”
Now coding itself is being automated. To outsiders, what programmers are facing can seem richly deserved, and even funny: American white-collar workers have long fretted that Silicon Valley might one day use A.I. to automate their jobs, but look who got hit first! Indeed, coding is perhaps the first form of very expensive industrialized human labor that A.I. can actually replace. A.I.-generated videos look janky, artificial photos surreal; law briefs can be riddled with career-ending howlers. But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it’s worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose.
You might imagine this would unsettle and demoralize programmers. Some of them, certainly. But I spoke to scores of developers this past fall and winter, and most were weirdly jazzed about their new powers.
