For the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I talked to Clive Thompson about one of the conversations that I'm having most often these days: What happens to coders in this current moment of extraordinarily rapid evolution in AI? LLMs are now quickly advancing to where they can virtually become entire software factories, radically changing both the economics and the power dynamics of software creation — which has so far mostly been used to displace massive numbers of tech workers.

But it's not so simple as "bosses are firing coders now that AI can write code".

For one thing, though there are certainly a lot of companies where executives are forcing teams to churn out slop code, and using that as an excuse to carry out mass layoffs, there are plenty of companies where "AI" is just a buzzword being used as a pretense for layoffs that owners have wanted to do anyway. And more importantly, there are a growing number of coders who are having a very different experience with the tools than those bosses may have expected — and a very different outcome than the Big AI labs may have intended. As I said in the story:

“The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see LLMs differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, LLMs take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” Dash says. “And in coding, LLMs take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.”

This is a point that's hard for a lot of my artist friends to understand: how come so many coders don't just hate LLMs for stealing their work the way that most writers and photographers and musicians do? The answer boils down to three things:

• Coders have long had a history of openly sharing code with each other, as part of an open source, collaborative culture that goes back for more than half a century.
• Tools for writing and creating code have almost always offered a certain degree of automation and reuse of work, so generating code doesn't feel like as radical a departure from past practices.
• Software development is one of the fields with the least-advanced cultures around labor, as workers have almost no history of organizing, and many coders tend to side much more with management as they've been conditioned to think of themselves as "future founders" rather than being in solidarity with other workers.

What this means is, attitudes about automation and worker displacement in tech are radically different than they would be in something like the auto industry, and in many cases, I've found that being part of a coder workforce has meant witnessing a level of literacy about past labor movements that is shockingly low, even though their technical knowledge is obviously extremely high.

Coders, in their heads and hearts

To be somewhat reductive about it, there are two main cohorts of coders. A larger, less vocal, group who see coding as a stable, well-paying career that they got into in order to support themselves and their families, and to partake in the upward economic mobility that the tech sector has represented for the last few decades. Then there is the smaller, more visible, group who have seen coding as an avocation, which they were drawn to as a form of creative expression and problem-solving just as much as a career opportunity. They certainly haven't been reluctant to capitalize on the huge economic potential of working in tech — this is the group that most startup founders come from — but coding isn't simply something they do from 9 to 5 and then put away at the end of the day. For those of us in this group (yeah... I'm one of these folks), we usually started coding when we were kids, and we have usually kept doing it on nights and weekends ever since, even if it's not even part of our jobs anymore.

Both cohorts of coders are in for a hard time thanks to the new AI tools, but for completely different reasons.

For the 9 to 5

The people who started to write software just because it represented a stable job, but who don't see it as part of their own personal identity, are going to be devastated by the ruthlessness with which their bosses will swing the ax. These new LLM-powered software factories can generate orders of magnitude more of the standardized business code that tends to be the bread-and-butter work for these journeyman coders, and it's not the kind of displacement that can be solved by learning a new programming language on nights and weekends, or getting a new professional certification. Much of the "working class" tech industry (speaking of the roles they perform functionally within the system; these are obviously jobs that pay far more than working class salaries today) are seen as ripe targets for deskilling, where lower-paid product roles can delegate coding tasks to coding AI systems, or for being automated by management giving orders to those AI systems.

One of the hardest parts of reckoning with this change is not just the speed with which it is happening, but the level of cultural change that it reflects. Coders are generally very amenable to learning new skills; it's a necessary part of the work, and the mindset is almost never one of being change-averse. But the level at which the change is happening in this transition is one that gets closer to people's sense of self-worth and identity, rather than to their perceptions of simply having to acquire knowledge or skills. It doesn't help that the change is being catalyzed by some of the most venal and irresponsible leaders in the history of business, brazenly acting without any moral boundaries whatsoever.

For the nights and weekends

For the coders that see being a coder as part of their identity, the LLM transformation is going to represent an entirely different set of challenges. They may well survive the transition that is coming, but find themselves in an unrecognizable place on the other side of it. The way that these new LLM-based tools work is by turning into virtual software factories that essentially churn out nearly all of the code for you. The actual work of writing the code is abstracted away, with the creator essentially focused more on describing the desired end results, and making sure to test that everything is working correctly. You're more the conductor of the symphony than someone who's holding a violin.

But there are people who have spent decades honing their craft, committing to memory the most obscure vagaries of this computer processor or that web browser or that one gaming console, all in service of creating code that was particularly elegant or especially high-performing, or just really satisfying to write. There's a real art to it. When you get your code to run just so, you feel a quiet pride in yourself, and a sense of relief that there are still things in the world that work as they should. It's a little box that you can type in where things are fair. It's the same reason so many coders like to bake, or knit, or do woodworking — they're all hobbies where precisely doing the right thing is rewarded with a delightful result.

And now that's going away. You won't see the code yourself anymore, the robots will write it for you while falling around and clanking. Half the time, the code they write will be garbage, or nonsense. Slop. But it's so cheap to write that the computer can just throw it away and write some more, over and over, until it finally happens to work. Is it elegant? Who cares? It's cheap. Ten thousand times cheaper than paying you to write it, so we can afford to waste a lot of code along the way.

Your job changes into describing software. Now, if you're the kind of person who only ever wanted to have the end result, maybe this is a liberation. Sometimes, that's what mattered — we wanted to fast-forward to the end result, elegance be damned. But if you were one of those crafters? The people who wrote idiomatic code that made that programming language sing? There's a real grief here. It's not as serious as when we know a human language is dying out, but it's not entirely dissimilar, either.

If ... Then?

What do we do about it? This horse is not going back in the barn. The billionaires wouldn't let it, anyway.

I've come to the personal conclusion that the only way forward is for more of the hackers with soul to seize this moment of flux and use these tools to build. The economics of creating code are changing, and it can't just be the worst billionaires in the world who benefit. The latest count is 700,000 people laid off in the last few years in the tech industry. We'll be at a million soon, at the rate things are accelerating. Each new layoff announcement is now in the thousands.

It's not going to be a panacea for all the jobs lost, and it's not the only solution we're going to need, but one part of the answer can be coders who still give a damn looking out for each other, and building independent efforts without being reliant on the economics — or ethics — of the people who are laying off their colleagues by the hundreds of thousands.

I've spent my whole career working with communities of coders, building tools for the people who build with code. I don't imagine I'll ever stop doing it. This is the hardest moment that I've ever seen this community go through, and it makes me heartsick to see so many people enduring such stress and anxiety about what's to come. More than anything else, what I hope people can remember is that all of the great things that people love about technology weren't created by the money guys, or the bosses who make HR decisions — they were created by the people who actually build things. That's still an incredible superpower, and it will remain one no matter how much the actual tools of creation continue to change.