Last week at work, I listened to the Engineering Product Annual Kickoff. All the company's engineers were listening to the CTO talk about his vision for engineering at the organization. Within 30 minutes, the breath was 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 important to society, was intellectually difficult, and accordingly, 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 starting to realize it.

Going back to 2023, AI has been a topic of conversation, and many people -- both engineers and regular workers alike -- have been trying to keep up with the technology. I give a lot of credit to the engineers 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 do: learn the newest framework, the up-and-coming language, the new coding paradigm. This is just like other workers who need to constantly learn new skills. 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 actually is (or is soon going to be) 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.

Mind you, I haven't been coding for several years now. But I remember how amazing and fun coding was. I remember back in high school, I built a poker game in 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. I studied computer science in school, and my first job out of college was as a software engineer. I 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 until I could debug the program or find the right algorithm to make my program work. The flow I experienced during coding is unlike almost anything else I’ve ever had in my career. It's just an amazing state of mind.

The career that coding afforded to so many people -- many of whom I know love coding today the way I loved it while I was a developer -- is now gone. And that realization shows in an actual, almost palpable fear in the faces of all these people who are 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 will simply be 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 reality is that humanity has been able to build something that is smarter (however we define smarter) than humans themselves. Or if not smarter in the classical human sense of consciousness, at a minimum, equally capable of executing many of the same tasks that filled up the days of humans.

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 engineering product kickoff meeting when the breath was taken out of every engineer, the overwhelming feeling was definitely not excitement. It wasn't even fear. It was disbelief.