by carefree-bob | 2026-02-11 07:37:22+00:00
No, they are paid to write code.

Writing code is hard. It is just as hard today as it was 10 years ago. Maybe harder, because stacks have become much more complicated.

Leaving aside the world of a startup that needs a simple CRUD app written, when you write software that is successful, it gets large and complicated. It fills up with features, and is really hard to understand.

Onboarding new people into that codebase takes time. When you don't know the code, you are not very productive, you make mistakes because you don't understand the repercussions of what you are doing. Your code hurts performance, it interferes in subtle ways with other parts of the system. It breaks conventions.

I've worked in companies where it basically takes a year to get really productive, and you need to give people a lot of mentorship and supervision in that first year.

And the second year you are better than your first, and every year you get better, because you understand the code better. As you understand the code better, you get more productive and more valuable to the company.

You have to keep all that code in your head and really understand it well. Not many can do this for large codebases. Code has gotten easier to write, with more ergonomic problems, but understanding a complex code base and being able to add features to it while maintaining performance requirements and quality requirements remains as hard as it was, and being able to do that remains a skill that companies desperately need. AIs, with their limited context window and shaky reasoning ability have not changed this.

Now, what happens with developers who grow to rely on AI to write code? You lose comprehensibility of your own code.

Again, ignoring the simple CRUD app or demo project, if you are working on a million line codebase, after 6 months of having AI write code, you no longer understand large parts of that codebase.

But you are the one responsible for catching the AI bugs! How's that gonna work?

It takes a great effort to read and understand code that someone else wrote. It is much, much easier to understand code you wrote. As you write less and less code, your mind drifts away from that productive zone, and you become less valuable, not more.

Microsoft is a great example of a company that lost the ability to ship features in a timely manner and that meet basic quality checks. Windows is a large, complex codebase. I'm pretty sure I know what got MS into the problem it's in.

And AI is just headshotting tech company after tech company, causing them to miss deadlines and ship buggy features as they de-skill their own developers and lose the ability to stay ontop of the complexity of their code.

Fortunately it's not happening to every tech company, but a good chunk of them are slowly turning into companies staffed by people that don't understand their own codebase.

This is not going to end well for these companies, or for the developers that stop writing code. I am not worried about programming as a profession, as cleaning this mess up is gonna require massive labor, but I am certainly worried about what is happening to companies like Microsoft or Facebook as they go all in on AI. When those companies fail, a lot of people will lose their jobs.

We are already seeing many well known companies really struggle with shipping code on time and meet basic quality requirements.