Death of the Coder

How a single company demonstration convinced me that my days of coding are as obsolete as the home phone. I'm a product manager now or I'm looking for a new job.

I started my day on Friday refreshing myself on coding patterns that had slipped my memory. Unless I’m coding hour after hour, I need to stay on top of the syntax: ten minutes reviewing a Python code library called pandas. The details are subtle: the steps to shuffle column order, the parameter to return a data frames in place, the datatype of columns returned in a Series. By the end of the day, it couldn’t have been clearer that none of this—not a single function call—mattered any more. I could see the arcane skills required for software coding are as dead as record vinyl or the home phone.

A meeting late last Friday proved it. The technical members of my company were gathered on a conference call to introduce a new generative AI program. “You are no longer a coder when you work with this tool,” the meeting host promised. “You’ll be more of a product manager now. Your job is to describe a vision and let the program develop it.”

Three software engineers then shared their projects to prove it: a hands-on lab developed in five hours, a template created for the company library, a solution for a client with sample data for their industry, personalized functionality based on a discovery conversation. Thousands of lines of the code to develop these generated by our new tool in the space of hours.

“Make me an application that…”

We need to create demos for our products, hands-on labs and other software tools to tell the story of what our company does and prove how we make an impact on our client’s businesses. Each of these activities has been time-intensive. Coding is slow, rigorous. The risks of demo failures keep you on your toes. You think you’re done with a solution, then a whole new surprise set of bugs or requirements emerges. Our competitors are pushing as hard as we are. Efficiency developing these solutions and training clients to use our software is a huge competitive differentiator. Storytelling through code is my job. The new possibilities are staggering.

I thought I’d already seen the shift. This is not my first time seeing generative AI write and debug code. I have been using ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models extensively in my work for months now: it has been possible to quickly turn out code with them, to describe a graph I’d like to see generated, to add flawless error handling everywhere it’s needed, and then voila it materializes. I’ve felt almost guilty with the speed I’ve been able to pull solutions together over the last year or so. It’s been like cheating. Yet for all of that, I’ve still felt I need to memorize Python constructs on the subway on the way to work.

But even that marvel of assistance has been made redundant. The tool that was demonstrated no longer works question at a time, a single, serialized question and response through a tool like ChatGPT. Coding is now a design session. I can describe the application I would like to build, who it’s for, the business impact I want it to have, rough ideas I have for its UI.

And if I don’t have clear ideas in mind, I can brainstorm together with it until we have charted out a course together. I watch it spin out long lists of orderly tasks for itself to accomplish. I can read its “internal dialog” as it unfolds before me and chugs away at blistering rates.

“The user is now asking me to break the display into three tabs… I have identified the bug and am now fixing it… the user wants to add an advanced features section that is revealed through a sidebar check box. ”

My responsibilities are now description and clarification. I am more of a product manager now with his personal development team. My challenges have fundamentally altered. I have to completely rethink my value and the possibilities I can render. Because, done right, I can demonstrate that afternoon. I can drop jaws. I am now competing with the other newly minted product managers at my competitors. I am in a race to adapt.

Just like that, my task is to communicate to machines. My job is to clarify. My job is to dream.

And fast.