GoKawiilOver the past month I’ve received three letters in a row from strangers — all software engineers I’ve never met. One was a frontend developer in infrastructure, another did data ops, the third was somewhere in between. The three letters look different, but they ask the same question.
The first one asked me: “Do you think one day all of it will be handed over to AI? If so, do code reviews even still need humans?”
My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest.
The second was more direct: “Is our future job going to be building AI and then letting it replace ourselves?”
The third was the longest. The writer listed every reason he was embracing AI-assisted coding — fewer rewrites, less communication overhead, more output — and then admitted at the end: if things keep going like this, what happens to my own growth? He hadn’t figured that part out.
These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?
I gave fragmented answers in my replies, but I knew they weren’t enough. The question deserved a more complete answer, so I wrote this essay. It’s a shared question and one I’ve been turning over in my own mind lately. Writing my thoughts down may help others who are wrestling with the same thing.
I. The Spinning Jenny
The blue mountains cannot hold it back — the river still flows east. — Xin Qiji, Pusa Man · Inscribed on the Wall at Zaokou, Jiangxi
A little over two hundred years ago in England, a spinning frame called the Spinning Jenny came into the world. One person could now do the work of several. Yarn got cheap, and the hand-spinners who had made their living with a pair of hands and an old wheel saw their livelihoods collapse in a matter of months.
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