The Bosses Are Coding Again. Here’s Why That Should Worry You
In my previous article, I argued that AI is just the next abstraction layer — the same pattern we’ve seen a dozen times in software history. Each layer demands a new skill. So what does the AI layer demand? I think the answer is hiding in plain sight. And some very powerful people just demonstrated it. Something Interesting Happened Recently Mark Zuckerberg started coding again after a 20-year break. According to multiple reports, he moved his desk to Meta’s AI lab, spends 5 to 10 hours a week writing code, and is “coding all day long” alongside the Meta Superintelligence Labs team. The man who built Facebook in a dorm room and then spent two decades managing tens of thousands of people — is shipping diffs again. Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, returned to coding after 15 years using AI tools like Claude Code. He described himself as “addicted” to it, sleeping four hours a night because he couldn’t stop building things. Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder who stepped back from day-to-day operations years ago, came out of retirement to code on Gemini. He’s reportedly assembling an elite “coding strike team” and is directly involved in hands-on development. And there’s a quote from The New Stack that captures this perfectly: executives are building with AI because they were “tired of explaining it to somebody who was supposed to build it for me.” Why is this happening? These people haven’t written production code in over a decade. What changed? The Career Ladder Was Always About Communication Let’s take a step back. The most common career paths for a developer are either the strict technical way — from developer to tech lead, then architect — or the management way — team lead, then head of engineering, CTO. In both ways you start from doing things yourself and gradually move to teaching — or better to say, guiding — others how to do it. Or strictly overseeing the whole process. You stop writing code and start writing explanations. You stop implementing and start reviewin