Career safety in the Age of AI Layoffs

There is a strange contradiction happening in software engineering right now. A lot of developers are worried that AI is going to make them obsolete. At the same time, the people building the most capable AI coding tools are demonstrating something that should probably make us rethink what being a software engineer actually means. I don't think the future is one where nobody understands software anymore. I think it is one where writing the software becomes dramatically cheaper. And if that happens, the thing that makes an engineer valuable has to move. That is what I mean by career safety. Career safety isn't about making yourself impossible to replace. It is about making your value portable. We've always resisted giving up the code Developers have a long history of being suspicious of abstractions that take work away from us. We went from machine code to assembly, from assembly to higher-level languages, from manually managing memory to garbage collection, from building everything ourselves to libraries and frameworks, and from text editors to IDEs. We even had entire categories of tools, such as CASE tools, designed to automate parts of software development. And every time, there was resistance. Because programmers don't just use code. We build our identities around it. John Carmack captured this unusually well when he wrote: “Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. — John Carmack He followed that with the more important point: Problem solving is the core skill. — John Carmack That is a difficult idea for developers to internalize because coding is tangible. You can point at the repository. You can point at the pull request. You can count the commits. You can say, "I wrote this." But the business doesn't ultimately pay you for the number of lines you wrote. It pays you for what those lines accomplish. The business never really bought the code A company doesn't wake up in the morning thinking: "We need 14,000 more line