I think the job of being paid money to type code into a computer will go the same way as punching punch cards […] in six years time, I do not think anyone will be paid to just to do the thing where you type the code. I think software engineering will still be an enormous career. I just think the software engineers won’t be spending multiple hours of their day in a text editor typing out syntax.
The more time I spend on AI-assisted programming the less afraid I am for my job, because it turns out building software—especially at the rate it’s now possible to build—still requires enormous skill, experience and depth of understanding.
The skills are changing though! Being able to read a detailed specification and transform it into lines of code is the thing that’s being automated away. What’s left is everything else, and the more time I spend working with coding agents the larger that “everything else” becomes.
— Read on simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-for-2026/
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