I keep reading more and more about how AI will revolutionize coding, how you simply have to know and use AI agents for people to consider you for a developer job, and how using it is already the new normal for most programmers.

Pondering these articles and how much I'm being pressured to use AI at any available opportunity, made a question pop up in my mind.

Do I even want to be a coder anymore?

The thing is, I like coding. No, actually, I love coding. It's like lightweight puzzle solving, having to plan on how to solve a problem and then actually writing it out, in a succinct yet comprehensive, easy-to-understand way. It's a craft I have honed in this industry for over 15 years now. Tools have changed along the way, and it currently seems that AI is here to say.

And don't get me wrong; I only have a few quibbles about using it in daily work, things that probably will be improved over time as the tech and implementations mature. I'm not an "AI teetotaler" like I have heard some developers be described. But I think the current push for it and the trajectory of its adoption is just not sustainable, both in code velocity and the quality.

I thought about this for some days, and I came to a conclusion:

If an employer expects me to only prompt all my coding and review tasks, day in and day out, then no, I don't want to be a coder anymore.

Luckily, I don't think that's going to be the end result of all this AI hype. I bet that AI will grow as a software development tool, and all employers will expect their employees that have some kind of grasp of it. Kind of like source control and containers feel at the moment.

But we'll see. In the meantime, I will definitely not be applying for any developer jobs that only mention which AI agents they use, and none of the infrastructure or programming tools they have (Yes, I have actually seen these already.)