AI Hype

Both sides of the AI coding war are wasting their breath. The barrier to shipping software has dropped from years to hours, the fight was lost 18 months ago, and no amount of yelling about slop or gatekeepers is going to change that.

Dear technology professionals,

Every day, I see people in the tech industry picking a side in the AI coding battle and going to war over whether Artificial Intelligence agents like hashtag#ClaudeCode / hashtag#Codex are a viable coding alternative to human engineering.

One side is throwing insults around about "AI Slop" or talking about how they will be cleaning up vibe coder garbage. The other side shouting about gatekeepers or how the old world needs to keep up.

It's all a complete waste of time and energy.

Creating software, services, SaaS etc is insanely complex. It used to take years of effort before anyone would consider themselves able to create something "production" ready for customers.

#AI has changed that. The complexity is the same, but the need for a human to deal with it, is being removed. The barrier to entry has gone from 4 or 5 years, to 4 or 5 hours.

This has changed the landscape of software development forever, and it is never going back. Absolutely nothing is going to stop this. If you are an experienced engineer today, you need to very rapidly move through the five stages of grief because your career of choice is dead. Sure, you're still walking around and bashing away at the keyboard, but it's just a matter of time. You've got a bad case of "Stage 4 AI" and all the medical staff are talking about making you comfortable.

How long it takes, is very much up for debate. You might have 2 years, you might have 5, but it's a done deal.

While we all stand around waiting to see who gets made redundant first, I would suggest a few things:

Adapt

In the last 25 years, I have never seen employees win over changing technology. Either adapt or get replaced/redundant. The tech industry is a boneyard of dead solutions we once called a career opportunity.

Teach

You know a lot, you've likely seen every stupid things a person can do in this industry. So teach. Find the vibe coders, and help them understand that code is only the start. Teach security, agility, resilience, scaling. Teach them what prompts they need to give Claude besides "Make it look good".

Jump ship

Redundancy is a simple fact of life in any industry / company. You've got two choices. Wait for the hammer to drop and find yourself out of work, or jump early. Waiting is the worst possible choice. That guarantees you will get dumped into the job market among thousands of your peers, all fighting for the remaining jobs.

You can not, and will not, stop this industry transition. It's already happened, the battle was lost 18 months ago. What you do next, however, can dramatically impact your quality of life, ability to pay the rent and care for the people who depend on you.

Darwinism is not kind and it does not care. Adapt or die.