Software engineering might become a young person's game. That's the uncomfortable argument from Sean Goedecke, who says AI coding assistants could give the profession a shelf life similar to professional sports: roughly fifteen years of high earnings before your skills erode beyond usefulness.
The logic is blunt. Using AI to write code means you learn less from writing code. That seems obvious. And Goedecke doesn't deny it. His point is that it doesn't matter. Market competition creates a prisoner's dilemma where engineers who refuse AI to preserve their skills get outcompeted by those willing to trade long-term capability for short-term speed. "You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so," he writes, comparing holdouts to carpenters refusing power tools.
History backs up the deskilling concern. Harry Braverman documented how scientific management separated planning from execution, degrading worker skills across industries. Spreadsheets like VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 let people build financial models without understanding the underlying math. Aviation saw the same pattern with autopilot systems, and investigators partially blamed skill atrophy for the 2009 Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash.
None of this is happening in a political vacuum. Goedecke notes that Sam Altman's home was firebombed and an Indianapolis city council member was shot at for supporting data centers. Brian Merchant and Gavin Mueller, prominent voices in the anti-AI movement, have argued for embracing Luddite-style resistance. Goedecke's advice to engineers isn't to fight the tide but to plan for it. Save money and expect obsolescence. Don't assume the good years last forever.
As more engineers lean on LLMs, their coding skills atrophy. A SiteBloom opinion piece argues that deliberately practicing manual coding will become a competitive edge as skilled engineers grow scarce. It examines forces pushing AI dependency (social pressure, model quality, plus plain laziness) and scenarios for engineers who embrace versus resist agentic workflows.
Kyle Kingsbury tears into the AI coworker concept. When Anthropic let Claude run a vending machine, it lost money, invented accounts, and hallucinated visits to fictional addresses. The real problems run deeper: automation erodes human skills, liability lands on companies who can't verify AI output, and the wealth flows straight to big tech.