So basically this. I teach bachelors in programming, and a third year asked me

"are we still going to have jobs".

Then Reddit asked the same question

"does it make sense to move to freelance as a dev or should I find another career due to AI".

Then my dad sent me a (maybe panicked) text message

"are you going to keep your job".

So I guess that question is interesting for a quite diverse group of people (my dad is too old to be at school and don't use Reddit - as far as I know).

The basic disclaimer is: everyone is still figuring it out - the tech, the economics but mostly the impact. Me included. Below are my understanding at this exact time.

Using AI

Well, yes, I do use it (mostly Claude Code, but don't think it matters much). I don't believe the "we're all doomed" people that think no white-collar job will exist in 18 months, but I don't believe the "this is a useless tool" gang either, due to... using it.

It feels difficult for me to argue against any usage once you assume productivity is something useful. My customers pay me to ship stuff. Budget, planning, and speed matter.

I don't like the concentration it generates, I don't like the climate impact, but it's there, and saying "no no" does not seem like a valid strategy.

About the job

• Being able to implement something properly based on clear requirements and an existing system architecture is losing value fast. This is what is extremely easy to delegate to Claude and the like.
• Related: We're unclear about what (if anything) to do with juniors, with an interesting situation: they are getting "useless" as juniors, but without juniors we'll never get seniors.
• As a senior dev in a team of other senior devs, we see it change our productivity, but also that the limit is "how much can we store into our brains" and that one did not change much. We can push far more features out, at the cost of having no idea what we are shipping (this bit me in the ass this exact week, and it was not pretty).
• The review part of the job is broken. A team of 8 was used to review/discuss 5 PRs per week. Now there are 50. So what? We just review much less (because the alternative is letting the list of PRs build up).
• As a senior dev, I feel AI has taken all the "easy/no-brainer" part of my job: executing once I've decided what to do and my approach. The downside is: I'm not sure I have 8 hours of "high alert/cognitive activity" in each day. I may be burned out at 12 AM, having done in those 4 hours more than in 8 previously. I'm not sure how to sell to my customers that they should just pay the same and that I'm going to go for a walk during the afternoons.
• My main value (talking to customers, proposing options, taking decisions on technical stack) is mostly untouched.

About selling myself

Disclaimer: my self-described job is "one-man product team" (as in, I'm a generalist).

I'm not seeing any problems in that area right now. People need developers that think with them. About problems, about solutions, about design, etc. Those tasks are not going away. This is the direction I took in my career 10+ years ago, and it's still as relevant as ever. It may mean working a bit between tech and product side, but I'm old enough so that "product" was not a job when I started, just something devs did.

Now, teams with "one senior guy/gal that thinks and four people that execute" will be down to "just one guy/gal," but in my universe (small teams, startups/scaleups), those were already in danger, so again no world-shattering change here.

I guess specialization can still work, but pure technical jobs are more in danger than mixes of tech and support or product or analysis, etc.

Hope it gives some perspective.

Opinions? Let me know on LinkedIn!