Last week at work, I listened to the engineering product annual kickoff. All the engineers of the company were ostensibly listening to their CTO talk about the vision for engineering at the organization. Within 30 minutes, it was as if I could sense the breath being taken out of every engineer there. It was as if their world had completely changed—because it had.

Verbatim, the CTO said, "Within the next couple of months, you should no longer be coding; everything should be done via AI." This seems like a trivial statement, but he was saying this to hundreds of engineers—practitioners of a craft who have spent years, if not decades, honing a skill that historically has been considered extremely important to society, highly admired, and highly compensated. Suddenly, that entire world disappeared. The rug had been pulled out from under them. And I think, for the first time, they are actually starting to realize it.

Going back to 2023, AI has been a topic of conversation, and many people—engineers and regular workers alike—have been trying to keep up with the technology. I give a lot of credit to the engineers specifically who kept learning new tools, became better at prompting, tried out every new model, and kept up with agents and platforms like n8n. They tried to keep up with all the tools necessary to be an effective engineer in the age of AI.

This is actually pretty similar to what engineers have always had to learn: the new framework, the new language, the new skill set. It’s much like other workers. But in the last two months, it’s changed. It’s no longer just that AI is a tool you’re going to use; it’s that AI is actually better at your job than you are. I think all these engineers realized that at some point in the very near future, their day-to-day life—what they love and what they are experts in—is disappearing. There will no longer be any coding.

I myself am a former engineer. I studied computer science in school, and my first job out of college was as a software engineer. Candidly, I can look back at coding as some of the fondest moments of my life. I loved coding; I loved getting into a flow, trying to solve a problem, and hitting my head against the wall because I couldn't debug the program I was working on or figure out the right algorithm. That flow I experienced during coding was unlike almost anything else I’ve ever had in my career. It is just an amazing state of mind.

Mind you, I haven't been doing this for several years now, so I'm already somewhat removed from it. But I remember how amazing and fun coding was. I remember back in high school, I built Poker with a GUI using Visual Basic when I was sick for three days. That's what I did when I was sick at home, and I loved it. All that is gone. The joy is gone. The career that it made for so many employees is gone, and there's no look of fear—there's actual, almost palpable fear in the faces of all these people trying to reckon with what's to come: their careers, their meaning in life, their finances. All of it.

This is just the first domino to fall. It starts with engineering, and I'm confident that at some point—six months, twelve months, two years, pick your timeframe—the same realization is going to come for every career: AI is better able to do your job than you are. It's a scary time in some ways; in other ways, it's unbelievably amazing. The realization is that humanity has been able to build something that is smarter (however we define smarter) than humans themselves—or if not smarter, equally capable of executing many of the same tasks.

The optimistic side of me wants to say it's unbelievably exciting to see what this unlocks for the future. But in the moment, in that kickoff when the breath was taken out of every engineer as if they were punched in the chest, it was definitely not excitement. The overwhelming feeling in the room wasn't even fear; it was almost disbelief.