[dhosek]

Having started using Claude Code at work, I think coding as we now know it will probably no longer be a career path in 5 years at the outside.

I’m old. If I had to, I could retire tomorrow, albeit on a restricted budget. But I worry about the younger folks (like my 25-year-old nephew) who haven’t built up the resources to survive without working who are in the field right now. There’s going to be a mega disruption and writing code is going to go the way of calculating square roots by hand or hot metal typesetting. There will still people doing it, but it will very much be a niche endeavor.

[cflewis]

It's a race to retool. If he can retool to an agentic coding environment quickly he will be OK. Might have to build up the skills outside of work if the current job doesn't allow for it, but I'm less worried about younger people realigning quickly. They're used to it, and younger people are so much more resilient/used to disappointment than we are (economic prospects have been so fucked for Zoomers for so long by so many "once in a lifetime" events and they still soldier on which is a huge testament to them).

Whether reviewing agentic code rather than writing it is a job he wants to do... Different question.

Its older people who can't or won't retool that are going to find that in the game of musical layoff chairs they won't have a chair left when the music stops (and some I've met haven't really internalized that they're even part of the game...)

[dhosek]

The rest of my 6-person team (ranging in age from 20s to late 50s maybe early 60s) has been very reluctant to embrace AI despite the push from our manager to do so. I was very much on their side initially, but creating a few little tools to ease some of my burdens sold me on the possibilities. It does feel like cheating and I have to admit that for one of the tools I built,¹ I haven’t even looked at the code, but rather did a few rounds of back and forth with Claude to make the thing do what I needed and to address bugs that showed up as a result of putting it through some real-world usage.

⸻

1. A Mac menu-bar app to make it easier to know when I need to either do a PR or look at someone’s feedback on my own PR. Clicking the icon shows a list of all open PRs that I’ve created or that my review has been requested on (and clicking an item there will open the PR so I can act on it). If there’s a PR that I’ve not left comments on or approved, or if there are unreplied/unclosed comments on my PR or it’s been approved, a badge is added to the menu bar icon.