A developer with 40 years of experience on how it feels like to program in the shadow of AI:

I don’t want to be dishonest about this. There’s a version of this post where I tell you that experience is more valuable than ever, that systems thinking and architectural judgment are the things AI can’t replace, that the craft endures in a different form.

And that’s true. When I’m working on something complex — juggling system-level dependencies, holding a mental model across multiple interacting specifications, making the thousand small decisions that determine whether something feels coherent or just works — I can see how I still bring something AI doesn’t. The taste. The judgment. The pattern recognition from decades of seeing things go wrong.

AI tools actually make that kind of thinking more valuable, not less. When code generation is cheap, the bottleneck shifts to the person who knows what to ask for, can spot when the output is subtly wrong, and can hold the whole picture together. Typing was never the hard part.

But I’d be lying if I said it felt the same. It doesn’t. The wonder is harder to access. The sense of discovery, of figuring something out through sheer persistence and ingenuity — that’s been compressed. Not eliminated, but compressed. And something is lost in the compression, even if something is gained.