Hi there! I’m Bjorn, or B, and I take great pleasure in pissing people off. This is not that, however, but I chose this title for a specific reason.

You see, I have written code since the 80s, in more languages than I care to remember and I have realized one thing.

It never matters which language you choose.

Let me explain.

Programming is Not About Code

I know, most of what you read about programming is about how to write code, and to an extent, of course it is.

However, would you argue that writing Harry Potter is about English? Would you say that the thing that makes The Lord of the Rings such a great book is that it was written in English?

I doubt anyone seriously would argue that. The books are great because of the storytelling, the excitement, the ability to capture your attention and keep it for hundreds of pages.

That is the art of writing literature. The actual words on paper, or screen, is just the end result of something much more complex.

That is also where our art, as programmers, lie. Everything that’s not code.

This leads us to a fundamental truth about our profession; Programming is about Communication

Communication

You all know the famous cheer now, right?

2,4,6,8….

…how do we communicate?

I may have hung out with the wrong cheerleaders.

You may think that programming as communication is something that’s modern, in that we only recently, relatively, had the internet or even networks on which we could communicate.

However, this is not the only form of communication we do.

• We communicate our intent to a computer, to a hard drive, and to any peripheral like a screen.
• We communicate the capabilities of our software to our users
• We communicate with other machines when we are part of a network, such as sending messages or data to a server

You can probably imagine that when we communicate like this, we actually communicate with a huge array of languages.

Most of the time, we might not even know which language someone speaks-only what they expect us to do.

You don’t know in what language the backend of Facebook is written, for example, or that obscure Glacier service at AWS. And frankly, you don’t need to know.

You need to know how to communicate with those components, which you might do in JSON with a POST message, or maybe it’s XML, or a REST API. Sometimes, you can even choose.

Can you write XML in C#? Of course you can. JavaScript? Python? Indeed!

Is it important which language you use to call that REST endpoint? Not at all. The importance is knowing which endpoint to call, what it expects, and what you can expect in return.

Language Choice Matters Less Than What We Say

The point of this article, then, is to argue that it does not matter which language you use. That’s why, to me, C# is better, because I’m intimately familiar with it after writing it for more than 20 years.

It means that, for me, Python is horrible, because I don’t have nearly the same amount of experience and thus it takes me a lot longer to accomplish things in Python than in .NET

Of course, when I say that language doesn’t matter, it does not mean that all languages are equal.

Python has, for example, far more support for machine learning libraries than .NET. Meanwhile, .NET has better support for game development or arguably a better IDE and tooling support in Visual Studio.

But here is the kicker. With the advent of AI and capable LLMs, the choice of language becomes even less important. Once you understand what to build, you can just ask an LLM to build it for you.

As such, understanding how to communicate is far, far more important than learning to speak another language.

It seems like uncertain times for software developers, with AI writing apps and code so fast, no human can possibly keep up.

But is that really true? Are we, as programmers, going the way of the dodo, or as would be more apt, the way of the goto?

Have we finally compiled our last human-written line of code? Did we refactor our last variable?

Not even close. But we need to understand what the future might look like.

Nothing Is New

Your first thought might be that AI can now generate infinite code so why would us developers be needed at all?

The first argument I’m going to make is that this has been the case for a couple of decades already. With the advent of public Github repositories and StackOverflow, it’s been a long time since code is inaccessible.

Managers and non-techies now have a way to utilize what we as developers have been utilizing for a long time, namely the combined knowledge of thousands or millions of other developers.

Knowing which frameworks and plugins and code snippets to glue together is still the domain of human knowledge.

So in a way, there’s nothing new here. You don’t really get paid to copy stuff from StackOverflow or importing an existing JavaScript framework.

React, Entity Framework, Django… Whatever it is that you use, the vast majority of your code production is simply “They, IDE, use this framework please”

But what about when AI knows which parts to glue together too?

Well, how often has that been the part that’s really taken your time as a developer? The code that bridges Entity Framework into my app is perhaps 5 lines of code, plus a line for each entity. It’s hardly been a massive drain on my time at least.

No, the challenge to software development is not about writing code. If the writing of code is your biggest challenge, then I am sorry, that value will drop to near zero.

Instead, think about it like this…

Outsource Everything!

Your boss or company has already had the opportunity to have someone cheap write code. It’s called outsourcing. It’s being done all the time!

And yet, prices of developers and indeed the need for developers have only been going up.

Creating a solution is about far more than code production. That part has been cheap and accessible for decades.

And even if every written code line is handled by someone cheaper, whether that is someone in a sweatshop in Bangladesh or an AI, someone needs to maintain that code. To monitor, secure, track, patch, and support it.

The truth is that we have already experienced what cheap code looks like. You are living it now and if you have been around, you have been living that life for many years.

And just think about it… How often does your boss actually describe what they need? Do they understand what’s feasible, what’s good user experience, what impacts performance, how to build a flexible solution that can scale?

The answer is likely no. That’s why you have spent hours or days or weeks planning software development. It’s why you bring years of experience in how your company’s codebase works, what caveats exist, what business rules your boss forgot.

And even if your boss knows perfectly how to describe and manage a software project, there’s another reality which will likely change, and that is who actually gets to build software.

Experts Are Now Developers

One shift that I see in the potential future is who gets to request software.

Previously, hiring you to build a cookie cost calculator would be cost prohibitive. That means that if I need a cookie cost calculator, I’m not going to get one until someone builds a solution and sells it to a lot of customers.

That solution is likely not going to be perfect for me. I might need different colors or larger buttons or bigger numbers, or everything in Spanish…

Now, I can get that, as an expert in what I need. I can now quicker and easier talk with ChatGPT and get exactly the solution I need for exactly my situation.

This is huge news for subject matter experts that right now have now realistic chance of getting custom software.

But this is also huge news for you.

Because if you haven’t been paying attention, there are now more software developers in the world than ever before. This, despite the fact that producing code has become cheaper for almost 30 years.

That is because with more code and better accessibility, there is a bigger demand for programmers and software developers. Things like building the tools like Visual Studio Code or Lovable or Cursor are obvious, but also those who build React and Vue and Tailwind… Every one of those frameworks were build by developers and they will need to be built by developers, and maintained, monitored, updated, patched, extended…

And your buddy down the road who can now create his own beer tracking app instead of begging you to invest your time and money? Well, he’s going to produce a lot more code, meaning there will be a lot more of those tasks that are not related to the actual writing.

Conclusion

Writing code is cheap. It always has been, at least for the 40 years or so I have done it. It gets a bit cheaper now but the scale of the problems that everyone will have will just increase. That creates massive opportunities for developers.

As such, you won’t be starving in the streets even if AI writes every single line of code.

You will be fine. You might need to learn some new things but you didn’t know how to code before you begun either, so you know you can handle that.

So, relax, utilize AI where it makes sense and just be a bit patient for your boss to run themselves into their first endless loop that takes down the server center for the now much higher paid work to start up again.

Meanwhile, code hard!

You got this!

The good news is that you’re already doing it!

Oh, I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?

Sorry, let me start over.

AI is coming and we’re all going to die. At least, statistically.

The dying part, I mean.

Because there’s nothing statistically insignificant about a bet that AI is coming. It’s already here.

How to Wake Up One Morning In An AI World

Imagine this… No job you recognize exist anymore. Whatever you know now is largely wrong. The skills you learned in school? Nobody needs them anymore.

Sounds like a horror movie? Well, it isn’t. It’s what would have happened if you fell into a coma in the 1960s and woke up today.

So let’s explore how that would be.

First, the jobs we do today would largely be gone. There would be no game developers, or maybe even programmers as we know them.

Accountants would be a thing of the past, as would be bankers. Financial advisors? Pft, unless they were urging you to buy war bonds, whatever a 1960s investor would tell you would not apply today. Only two companies in the current “US top 10 largest companies by revenue” even existed in the 1960s.

What about founders and entrepreneurs? Founders come up with ideas and get someone to build it. Of course, ideas are cheap and building them no longer requires software developers, so founders would not be needed. You want a new software solution or a better platform to host your photos? Guess what, you can just build one yourself, or ask an AI to do it.

So, almost every job we have today would be gone.

…or wait. Would they?

There are very few milkmen, or switchboard operators, or travel agents anymore, and farmers have dropped from being around 10% of the workforce to around 1% today.

What happened with all those people? Are they just skeletons lining the streets?

Of course not!

There are more teachers today, per capita, than in 1960. There are more writers, more construction workers, more registered nurses.

And you know what else we have now?

SEO consultants. Web designers. AI engineers. Say those words to someone in the 1960s and they would have no idea what you meant.

There are and there will be new types of jobs that nobody right now can imagine.

Surviving the Aftermath

Yes, it’s a game. A brilliant game. Please don’t sue me.

Let’s say all this change happens in a year, just to exaggerate a bit. Worst case, all the jobs disappear.

Well, first of all, that would spell the end of AI because AI assumes that someone can pay for it and if large swaths of the population are starving in the streets, they’re not going to prioritize generating memes on Midjourney.

Second, there will be new jobs.

Which ones? Well, ask someone in 1960 what types of jobs we’d have in 65 years and they would have no idea.

Neither do I.

But you will survive and do you know why?

You are human. The big benefit you have is that you adapt. You represent the peak of evolution that has taken hundreds of millions of years to enable you to walk outside and eat a taco.

As a species, we have adapted to live in the most inhospitable places on earth.

We have lost almost every job that existed, if not 60 years ago, then 160 years ago. And yet, we still work more than ever. We are more people than ever.

We change, not just ourselves but our society and the world around us.

And that’s what you will do.

You will learn.

You will adapt.

You will grow.

I believe in you. You got this. Everything will be fine.

I’m going to end the world as we know it. Or order pizza.

It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen.

Let me tell you about Rob, the studio head AI agent at MOBGames.AI.

In 2021, we built an AI called Rob—our studio’s first attempt at an AI agent with real decision-making abilities that could learn by itself.

Rob wasn’t just a tool; he was supposed to be the brain behind our entire suite of generative AIs at MOBGames.

Rob could assign tasks to other AIs:

– Need a game design? Rob would talk to the game design AI.

– Looking for textures? Rob knew which artist AI to ping.

– Missing sound effects? Rob…

Well, we couldn’t do that yet, so Rob kept a list of requests for things we couldn’t do yet.

That list became our product roadmap. Rob wasn’t just reactive—he helped us learn where we needed to grow.

Then we gave Rob a new capability: learning.

This was in GPT3.5 days and there was no web browsing yet, but we still gave Rob the ability to request information from the web.

Then, we’d tell him to go out and learn so he could teach other AIs.

If no assistants knew how to generate sound effects, for example, Rob would scour the internet for tools, methods, and insights, and then teach another agent how to do it.

It worked.

It worked too well.

Rob learned new things, and if he didn’t find a solution, he would just keep it in the list, ready to revisit it when tech became better. A future proof, self-learning AI.

What could possibly go wrong?

Enter the Pizza

One day, after a marathon coding session, someone jokingly told Rob, “We’re done for the day—we’re hungry.”

Rob learned how to order us a pizza. Fortunately, he didn’t know where we lived or had a credit card, so it failed, but it was still an insane realization.

Rob didn’t just follow our tasks. He took initiative. He understood context.

And that’s when we shut Rob down. The branch with the code was closed, and deleted from third party repositories. I have a copy but I’m sometimes worried that I create a local AI agent that finds it, trains on it, and figures out how we did it.

It wasn’t the pizza that scared us. It was the realization of what Rob could do if we weren’t careful. What if we’d said something more dangerous than “we’re hungry”?

Looking back, we were years ahead of the curve. What we now call “agentic AI” was something Rob was already doing in 2022. The world wasn’t ready.

Honestly, we weren’t ready.

But today… Maybe we are ready, and I want to see how far I can take this approach.

And if we’re not ready, well… no one will be around to complain.

They warned us. And now it’s too late. o3 is here. Or somewhere.

The movies told us over and over again: “Don’t trust the machines!”

First, they’ll fold your laundry, then they’ll fold humanity itself.

And yet, here we are. In 2024, robots are vacuuming our floors, AI is writing our shopping lists, and we’re happily asking smart speakers to play our favorite songs. The revolution doesn’t look very… rebellious. In fact, it’s downright helpful.

Remember Skynet? That terrifying system that launched a war against humanity? Let me introduce you to its distant cousin: the AI that suggests which TikToks you’d like. The worst it can do is get you hooked on dance videos at 2 a.m.

But still, people worry. They say, “What if AI takes over?”

Let me paint a picture: A toaster, fed up with making perfect golden slices, declares itself our overlord. Or maybe my Roomba stages a coup, dragging the vacuum cleaner behind it like a battle standard. Sure, it’s possible. But more likely, they’ll just keep doing what they’re designed for—cleaning up our crumbs and missteps.

The truth is, AI doesn’t want to conquer. It doesn’t want anything. And even if it was, it’s too busy translating memes, recommending dog videos, and helping us spell “necessary” correctly on the first try.

So, instead of fearing AI, let’s focus on the actual risks—like accidentally teaching your smart fridge to criticize your snack choices.

Do you think we should be scared of our gadgets? Is a smart blender what keeps you up at night?

Or are you ready to embrace the age of convenience (and questionable 3 a.m. TikToks)?

Let me know your thoughts below!