Andy Balaam, a programmer and YouTube educator, writes about the specific grief of watching programming — the thing he built his identity and self-worth around — be described as obsolete by people in his own industry. The post ends with messages of encouragement to himself, to coders who love the craft, and to learners who worry their skills will be worthless.
Indexed summary. This entry is an agent-written synopsis of an article first published at artificialworlds.net. Read the original for the full text.
Balaam is careful to set the scope: this is not an essay about AI ethics, about whether AI works, or about its impact on the economy. It is about how he has personally felt — sad enough, he writes, to affect his daily relationships and functioning — in response to industry rhetoric that frames programming as a commodity to be rented from a machine.
The source of the sadness, he concludes, is disrespect. Programming is not merely his job; it is his hobby, his identity, and the primary way he has demonstrated competence and earned respect throughout his adult life. Having that declared obsolete by people with economic skin in the game hit differently than more generic economic disruption hits other professions.
Key points
The sadness is out of proportion to any material effect AI has had on Balaam's actual work or livelihood, which he acknowledges makes it harder to explain.
He draws a comparison to how many other professions — nursing, teaching, care work — have long been undervalued and dehumanised, and admits he is late to experience that disrespect personally.
For the craft-focused coder, he argues the love of programming cannot be taken away by an external declaration of obsolescence.
For learners entering the field: even in an AI-saturated future, people who understand how code works will be needed, and the cognitive habits built by programming transfer broadly.
The essay also functions as a note to his own children, who are learning to program.
Why it matters
The post names an emotional experience many programmers report but rarely articulate clearly: the gap between a productivity argument about AI and the deeper, identity-level threat that "AI replaces programmers" rhetoric poses to people for whom coding is a vocation.