A New Golden Age for Programmers Begins

After twenty-five years of working in programming, I can say with great certainty that the time of this profession in its existing form has passed. Until just a few years ago it seemed everything was in perfect order, but the turn came suddenly and unexpectedly fast. At the very beginning, I want to point out that this short essay has no intention of being a lament or wailing over the cursed programmer's fate. After a quarter century spent in the software industry, I am quite accustomed to the daily changes and novelties one needs to study in order to remain fresh and competitive, and it is with this approach that I am writing this article as well.

Artificial intelligence has arrived (hereinafter AI) and abolished the programmer's job as it has existed up to now. If this sounds too pessimistic to anyone, then let me use a milder word — programming code has become a commodity, like wheat, corn, gold, silver — a standardized good that differs minimally regardless of which side of the world it comes from, and which is traded under the assumption of very similar quality regardless of origin.

AI has become a new layer of abstraction that understands ordinary language and turns it into code. Anyone who knows how to articulate their ideas through meaningful sentences can produce computer code without any knowledge of programming languages whatsoever. The profession of programmer, in the sense of someone who writes computer code (old-school programmer), can thus freely join the list of rare or forgotten crafts — goldsmith, cloak-maker, wool-carder, blacksmith, telephone operator… A few of them can still be found in forgotten shacks at the end of the world, but no one dreams anymore of becoming one of them.

We are currently in a transitional phase in which there are still positions in companies where old-school programmers work, but this is changing with great speed and soon almost all yesterday's programmers will be left without their previous jobs. Some will successfully manage numerous AI tools and agents and use them to build and maintain applications, but never again will anything be programmed by hand. For some time still, people will review code and fix small or large errors, but over time this will diminish, and in the very near future no one will read code anymore. In the next step, AI will write code much closer to some kind of machine language, so that to us it will be entirely incomprehensible.

The next thing this development brings is that there will be more software than ever. Since from now on many more people will be able to make software with the help of AI tools, this will bring a great quantity of new products to the market. Of course, in all of this there will be plenty of unusable things, but many good solutions will also appear. This will cause an enormous drop in the price of writing code, until it becomes entirely free. One will not be able to make a living from writing code as a profession.

Everything I have said so far seems rather dark, but it is all only at first glance. We find ourselves at a moment that opens great opportunities, but not for everyone — only for those who are ready to change.

A Brighter Future

How do all these dark clouds lead us to a brighter future? In the life of every programmer, it constantly happens that one has to get acquainted with new fields of human activity. Yesterday you were working on software that solves specific operations in the banking sector, and already today you find yourself in the real estate industry, biotechnology, architecture, or who knows what field. Simultaneously with developing knowledge in programming, you also have to familiarize yourself with the necessary basics of the new profession in which you are making software. This step always required the most effort in the time before AI.

Today this looks entirely different. From the first day of entering a new field, you have alongside you an army of top experts of the new environment in which you find yourself, in the form of LLM models and the agents that exploit them in the best possible way. Answers to all questions, of which there are too many during this process, are within reach. This situation changes things at their root, and shortens the time for entering a new field to a fraction of the former time we used to spend studying everything new we encountered.

On the other hand, from idea to the first result that can be shown, we arrive with incredible speed because we no longer have to type code by hand. We all know how important it is to get feedback from the client we are working for as soon as possible. Volumes have been written about the importance of an agile approach as opposed to waterfall, and now we can take all of this to the very limit, where the time for getting feedback equals or even exceeds the time for programming a new functionality, which until just yesterday was unthinkable.

From the outside, programmers always looked like introverts who prefer to spend time staring at their screens rather than communicating with others. This was always an entirely wrong concept. The problem was always that we had to spend too much time typing code. From idea to something that works, too much time always had to pass. We could not communicate often around feedback because we were slow at producing results. Now this is completely changing and we can finally be more talkative because we will more quickly have something to say in the programming sense.

The increase in the speed of delivering results will not create idle time or fewer jobs — on the contrary, it will open up many more jobs. Many will wish to solve their everyday problems with software because they will now be able to far more easily reach people who know how to turn their ideas into useful software products. Until now this was not the case because programmers spent the largest part of their time typing code and were not available to open their world to a great number of people and professions. A new flourishing in the software industry awaits us!

A Flourishing, but Not for Everyone

With the new flourishing comes also a change in the way of thinking. Anyone who imagined they would reach retirement as a narrowly specialized expert in three operations on the front-end of web applications that run in the browser will have to stand in front of the mirror and decide with themselves that this will no longer be possible. The flourishing is reserved for that layer of programmers who always wanted to know more broadly and more deeply.

I will never forget the lectures I attended at the beginning of my Mathematics studies under the exceptional Professor Milan Tuba at the end of the 20th century, in the course Computing 1, where at the start he explained how the goal of that course was to cover the basics of everything important in computer technology — hardware, software, networking, principles of encryption, and so on. This would give us a foundation from which we could later go in depth into different things. With such an approach, we never had any problem understanding any concept because the foundations on which things rest had been mastered at the beginning. The fundamental laws on which everything rests rarely change; changes happen at the level of usage.

If you wish to continue working in programming as a profession, you must return to the basics. Whatever you do, in the end things come down to understanding the principles that need to be applied to different situations. The programmer no longer types code, but continues to make important decisions that they made before as well — only that this was always just a fragment of the total time spent. Now the programmer can in parallel examine several different concepts in order to more easily decide which is better in a given situation. Earlier, that luxury did not exist because it was expensive.

Earlier, we had to remain in one field for several years in order to acquire knowledge and use it in the right way for the given field, while today we can move from one to another much more easily and painlessly without reduced efficiency or quality of our products.

The programmer of the new age knows the fundamental computing principles and applies them to different fields of human activity with the help of artificial slaves (robots) who carry out that part of the work that always required a great deal of time. The programmer of the new age has much more time for what was always most interesting to them — solving problems — and everything else is done for them by artificial slaves.

Welcome to the new golden programmer's age.