AI and the Future of Programming
I love handcrafted code. I love the elegance of a well-designed function, the satisfaction of a clean abstraction, the quiet pride in a system that works because you understood every line. That romance with the craft never left me.
But I can no longer pretend we have time.
I left my automotive career to fulfill my dream: becoming a software developer. I know what it means to start over, to bet on yourself, to learn a new craft from scratch. That journey meant so much to me that I started a YouTube channel to help others make the same transition to show them the path I’d walked.
But the path is changing faster than I expected.
What I Built in Hours, Not Weeks
A few months ago, I had a problem: I needed to track my finances. Before AI, I would have searched for an existing app, compromised on features I didn’t need, and lived with limitations that didn’t fit my workflow. Or I would have spent weeks, maybe months building something myself, learning the full stack piece by piece, debugging late into the night.
Instead, I built a fully functional full-stack application in TypeScript. With AI assistance, what would have taken me weeks took hours. The app works. It does exactly what I need. It’s mine.
I want to be clear about what this means. The code that came out wasn’t sloppy or prototype-quality. It was production-grade. It worked.
The bottleneck has shifted. Writing code is no longer the hard part. Understanding what needs to be built, knowing how the pieces should fit together, being able to evaluate whether the output is correct; these are the skills that matter now. Typing was never the point. It was always about thinking. But now the ratio between thinking and typing has changed dramatically.
Why This Matters
I know there’s noise in the market. Stock prices swing wildly. CEOs make grandiose claims. The hype cycle churns through excitement and disappointment in predictable waves. It’s tempting to dismiss all of this as another bubble, another overpromise, another technology that won’t live up to the marketing.
Ignore all of that. Watch what the tools actually do.
The shift I’m describing isn’t about valuations or investor sentiment. It’s about capability. The underlying technology has crossed a threshold, and it’s not going back. Every month it gets better. Every month the gap between what you could build alone and what you can build with these tools widens further.
The programmers who will thrive are the ones who can isolate problems cleanly, communicate intent precisely, and hold accurate mental models of complex systems. The skills haven’t changed, but the leverage they provide has been multiplied.
The Opportunity
I remember when I was learning how to code, staring at tutorials late at night, dreaming about what I could become. I wanted to be a full-stack machine, someone who could solve any problem with code. Need a backend? I’ll build it. Need a frontend? Done. Database, API, deployment? All of it. No limitations, no waiting on others, just pure capability to turn ideas into reality.
That dream always felt distant. There was so much to learn. So many frameworks, languages, patterns, best practices. Years of work just to become competent across the stack, let alone masterful.
Now that dream is within reach.
A single developer with domain expertise and clear vision can prototype in days what would have taken months. The barriers to building have dropped, and they’re still dropping. You don’t need a team anymore. You don’t need to specialize so narrowly that you can only build half of what you imagine.
For me personally, this means more building, not less. The things I always wanted to create but couldn’t justify the time investment, now I can build them. Side projects that would have taken years can happen in weeks. The constraint was never ideas. It was always time and energy. That constraint just loosened significantly.
The Concerns
I’d be lying if I said I’m not worrying.
There’s an obvious centralization risk. The most powerful models are controlled by a handful of companies. The infrastructure required to train them is extraordinarily expensive. This isn’t a technology that emerged from a garage; it came from organizations with billions of dollars in computing. That concentration of capability in few hands is genuinely concerning, and I don’t have easy answers.
Job displacement is real. We can debate the timeline and the extent but pretending it won’t happen is a fantasy. Some roles will disappear. Some people will be fired. The junior developer is learning the ropes by writing simple features. What happens to that path when a senior developer with AI tools can do the same work in a fraction of the time?
I don’t think the market will solve this by itself. We’ll need political and social responses: better safety nets, retraining programs, perhaps more radical rethinking of how we distribute the gains from increased productivity. These are not technical problems, and technologists shouldn’t pretend they are.
What Programmers Should Do Now
If you’re a working programmer, here’s my honest advice.
Don’t refuse reality. I understand the instinct. These tools threaten something we’ve built our identities around. The years spent mastering a craft, the hard-won expertise, the quiet knowledge that you can do something most people can’t, it’s painful to watch that advantage erode. But refusing to engage won’t protect you. It will only leave you unprepared.
Test these tools seriously. Not for five minutes. Not with a toy example that confirms your skepticism. Spend weeks with them on real problems. Push them. Find their limits. Develop an accurate model of what they can and cannot do. Your livelihood may depend on this knowledge.
And remember why you started coding in the first place.
It wasn’t because typing syntax was fun. It wasn’t because you enjoyed the mechanics of compilation. It was because you wanted to build things. You had ideas in your head, and you wanted to make them real. That’s the fire. That’s what drew you in.
That fire is still there. And now you can build more.
The joy was never about typing. It was about the building. And now, if you’re willing to adapt—you can build more than you ever imagined.