Will We Still Be Coding in 10 Years?

It’s been a hot-button question since the LLM’s blasted into the mainstream several years ago. Already, we’ve seen that AI has altered the structure of companies across the tech industry – most notably by deleting a lot of entry-level jobs, like at Meta and Microsoft, for example.From what we’ve seen so far in all sorts of different subsectors (not just the major player in Silicon Valley), the speed at which AI can support software development has triggered a shift in what companies now expect from their developers, who now need stronger skills in system design, software architecture, and security – not to mention working with AI-generated code.Sure, this AI-induced paradigm shift that we’re all currently living through is being felt in almost every field out there – from marketing to graphic design to HR. But I want to take a closer look at tech. Not just because there’s something deeply ironic about AI’s creators being the first to be under threat of redundancy from the beast they invented, but also because I think that, to understand the greater implications of the AI revolution, we need to visit ground zero and ask the question: will we still be coding in 10 years?Was There Ever a Paradigm to Begin With? Coding as a field is always playing catch-up with the tools that it creates. This has been true since the dawn of the digital age, when Bill Gates was hard at work in his parents’ garage. Back then, coders were accustomed to punching holes into physical cards, and after that, we developed high-level languages and manually typed them into computers. Until recently, we’d gotten very cosy with our visual builders, and now? AI is changing the game all over again. My point is that there is certainly an argument that, for coding specifically, there was never much of a paradigm to begin with. Programming has always been about translating ideas from a human into instructions that a machine can understand; the means of accomplishing is all that’s changed.So what’s different this time? Well, AI is the first of these technological shifts actually to upend the role of the programmer him/herself. The Job is Already Adapting Traditionally, those of us capable of writing code felt like craftsmen, slowly chipping away at our code until we’d built something fully functional. But as time goes on, I think it’s more likely that coding will feel like directing. The questions that had racked our heads in the past, like “how do I write this function?” will soon become “what does this system need to do?” and “what rules does it need to obey?” Despite the layoffs, engineers aren’t going obsolete overnight. Their jobs are changing, as are their skillsets. Looking ahead, systems thinking, architecture, and design clarity are likely to become the most sought-after skills. This won’t just be the case at a Fortune 500 company based in Silicon Valley, either. We’ll see this everywhere – from a web development agency in Texas to a design agency in Leeds and a new startup in Tokyo. This will likely be a ‘sink or swim’ moment for many.Closing Thoughts If I’m wrong, and we’re all just rearranging the decking ahead of the inevitable AI apocalypse, then it’s been a pleasure, folks. Perhaps coders will join everyone else in the pits, and we’ll all spend 12 hours a day mining for resources that can feed the vast data centre empire, as planet Earth eats itself into an early grave. Or, you know, we’ll all be ok.