Michael J. Nicholsondo i even want to work with ai?
https://michjnich.com/blog/2026-01-27-do-i-even-want-to-work-with-ai
decibyte> Where do those of us who enjoy the coding part of development go from here?
I am thinking about the same these days. The answer may be to somehow join forces and open slop free shops with like-minded people. I don't know if there's a market for that, though, as it seems all decision makers drank the Kool-Aid.
Benjamin Balder Bach@decibyte @michjnich maybe in the future, a low-code solution will mean "using less code" as in "less stuff can break, less stuff to maintain, faster and more performant, cheaper to scale"
And "less code" and complexity doesn't point towards AI (although maybe for "post-processing").
@benjaoming @decibyte How do you mean @benjaoming ? We've seen low-code tools come and go for years? Or do you mean that complex code will become "prompts as code"?
@michjnich @decibyte "low-code" as in "low amount of code" 😁
The actual low-code systems are an income generator for future developers, as they tend to need a lot of help. And now we're seeing the same for AI.
AI will produce more complexity because it favors self-contained changesets that do not integrate very nicely. An example from the Python world: the unnecessary local imports:
```
def view_written_by_ai(request):
from .models import TheModel # <= why?
```
@benjaoming @decibyte Ah, yes. I see a lot of that. And the "need a lot of help" is a big thing I think and it's hard to unpick how much the folks really loving the AI stuff are actually becoming Doctorow's "reverse centaurs" here ... maybe it's more smoke and mirrors than it seems?
@michjnich @decibyte while reading your great blog post (thanks for sharing!!) I was btw also wondering:
We're all aspiring to improve ourselves, as developers.
Industry/society wants better developers and better software.
Then instead of spending the resources on improving the developers (we've always been improving btw), we get this ENORMOUS diversion of resources into AI. It's like theft.
That money should have been spent on education for developers.
@michjnich @decibyte My IDE, PyCharm, is for instance also suffering from this: At the end of the day, they're building AI features I didn't want, and other areas are neglected.
@michjnich @decibyte someone tooted the other day (sorry don't remember who) that the worst thing about AI was how it steals narrative. That's also true. Like, we forget to develop our methods and tools and continue doing what we did because there's this whole AI issue to tackle (which is obviously threatening to pull the carpet)