It's interesting how most of the comments here seem to miss the most important part of the article, which is this:
> What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.
A little but further reinforced by this:
> I am just barely old enough that my first job title was “System Administrator”. [...] I lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure cattle.
What is happening now is nothing new, we have seen it many times before: a shift in technology which is bringing changes in the ecosystem, required skills and so on. This happened with stocking frames, steam engines [1], automobiles, servers, and now the code. Just like before, many will be - and already are - harmed by this, but ultimately the world will adapt and accept the new paradigm.
[1] There's an infamous screenshot of a tweet being shared around, where someone suggests various names for writing code without AI, and someone else responds with "software engineering". Allow me to add my on contribution to this debate: codejamming.
> What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.
A little but further reinforced by this:
> I am just barely old enough that my first job title was “System Administrator”. [...] I lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure cattle.
What is happening now is nothing new, we have seen it many times before: a shift in technology which is bringing changes in the ecosystem, required skills and so on. This happened with stocking frames, steam engines [1], automobiles, servers, and now the code. Just like before, many will be - and already are - harmed by this, but ultimately the world will adapt and accept the new paradigm.
[1] There's an infamous screenshot of a tweet being shared around, where someone suggests various names for writing code without AI, and someone else responds with "software engineering". Allow me to add my on contribution to this debate: codejamming.