It’s 2026, so I am legally obligated to write a blog post about AI.
“I am a programmer. Just like I’m a father and a husband and a son and a friend. It’s not something I do, it’s something that is fundamental to the core of my being. Like overly dramatic phrasing.”
@gknauss Very thoughtful and elegant. Thanks for writing.
In the back of my head, I kept thinking--no, you don't have to lose your identity because it has been usurped by capitalists. You'll always be the same person that enjoys crafting, puzzling, expressing, and refining...
If the job description of software engineering is changing to something else, then maybe they should change the title too... Your post alludes to "product manager", and that sort of seems to fit. After all, the skill of prompting and executing workflows resembles product management (or middle management) much more than "programming" or "engineering."
That does mean that "software engineering" gets lumped into the category of artist, writer, crafter... and while those categories are often at odds with industry, it's still not bad company to be in.
@pythonbynight I’ve spent my 35-year career explicitly fighting against becoming management, to my finance’s detriment and my sanity’s benefit. I need to get an “IC4LYFE” tattoo.
It’s just that the phrase “starving programmer” feels so strange after decades of lucrative self-fulfillment. My mortgage is almost paid off and I’m close to retirement, so “starving” isn’t really a concern, but I’m glad I don’t have to make the choice between “programmer” and “making a living.”
@gknauss Yup, I totally get that.
I'm on the other end of the spectrum where I did a mid-life career switch into software development nearly 2 years ago, finally finding something that satisfied my desire to create/build/tinker and actually get paid for doing that... I'm hardly thrilled at the prospective of workflow automation/babysitting through middle-manager imperatives... that feels more like my 'business analyst' job that I left those 2 years ago...
This is really good. Thanks for sharing it. I’m a geologist, not a programmer, but I think my own fears of losing a part of myself have kept me from using any of these tools. Is this the right way to go? I don’t know.
Thanks again.
@gws Maybe I’m cynical — the possibility exists — but this would require the market to have _ever_ recognized that skilled programmers are worth paying for. Companies had to, to this point, just to get something running. But I think that’s changing, and if quality suffers, well, they can take consolation in their enormous piles of cash.
Hope I’m wrong. Bet I’m right.
@gknauss I think you're getting in your own head a little too much. Sure you can bang out some work with an LLM that's basically a copy of someone else's code, but you could've already found a roughly similar project on the web 9 times out of 10 and then cloned and repurposed it. The big distinction there is that you may have had to read that code to make the 20 edits needed rather than letting the LLM burn tokens to interactively make 20 edits.
Being a professional programmer was, for a LOT of people, already a systems integration job half the time.
I'm not worried too much because I was already trying to write code as if I shouldn't have to solve problems that have already been solved; I research what's available, I find the right solutions, I liberally copy good ideas, and I try to limit invention to just stuff that needs to be implemented from scratch.
@DannoHung I think what’s changed in the past few months is that you don’t even need to stick the bits together anymore. A few sentences and Claude Code will produce something that not only uses all the proper APIs and libraries, but will LEGO them into a full running environment. Forget carving up a piece of wood, you don’t even need to figure out where the jigsaw pieces go.
It may not be elegant or graceful, but I’m guessing that most businesss will decide it’s good enough.
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