When All The Coders Are Gone.
When the coders are gone, will we miss them? The subculture? A glance 25 years into the future of almost no coders.
Maryam felt the butterflies leave her stomach as she let out a quiet sigh. For now her job was safe and for her team. Most of whom were humans. Her team in fact, had the most humans on it, all five of them. And the eight AI agents.
Quietly, Maryam opened her laptop as the morning sun streamed across the kitchen table. She opened their messaging app, the one they’d built specifically so no AI agents could access it. Only the humans on the team were allowed. She messaged everyone that the team was still intact, budgets approved. She’d see everyone in the office.
Last night, she and her partner Sarah had watched re-runs of a popular comedy show in the 2010’s about a group of nerds. Now, twenty-five years later in 2044, the tech jokes were sometimes lost, the coder language she couldn’t always understand and the show antiquated, but held a cvertain nostalgia for a time when nerds were, to some degree celebrated in society.
She remembered a decade ago, when human coders still outnumbered the AI agents. Her computer science curriculum had included 40% of the courses focusing on how to work with AI agents and tools. Ethics courses and even specialised sociology and cultural anthropology courses.
Her prof told her stories of how CompSci classes had been three times the size and some universities had several buildings for the computer sciences, even her university had had five buildings! Now they only had one. It had been moved to the former social sciences wing on the edge of the campus.
She even knew how to actually code in Python, which had come in handy when dealing with some legacy systems at the company, which, despite all the AI tools, still struggled with technology debt. They had an old database system from 2012 still running in the background. Not even the AI agents had figured out how to fix that challenge.
Maryam had just applied for a new position at the company, heading up the department that was responsible for managing the AI agents used across all departments. They worked closely with human resources monitoring the human-AI para-social relationships. For an edge over competitors she’d done an undergrad in psychology.
Her uncle, her dad’s older brother, who had been a software team lead told her how they’d had a sea of cubicles with developers and IT admins and engineers buzzing around. Many would work late into the night, coding, fixing problems. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d stayed after 5pm and was amazed people worked five days a week as their company only had four day weeks.
Her uncle told her too of the camaraderie of the coders, how they’d spoken another language, that it was a time of meritocracy. They’d gather around white boards spaced around the office, spending hours debating solutions. Celebrated wildly when someone solved for a problem. For a time he told her, coders and their work were seen as a type of art form.
There was a hacker code her uncle told her. A mindset of traditions and customs a certain ethic. There had been whole conferences for hackers, community hackathons, laptops and tablets everywhere. At one her uncles offices, he’d told her, the dev team held competitions on who could build the tallest stack of soda cans before management got fed up and ordered them taken down.
The way coders thought, their structured approach and methods of critical thinking had been packaged up and turned into courses to be applied in other parts of business. It had been a hot trend back in 2038, but that too, had faded.
For a while, a couple of years ago, Maryam had been fascinated by what the world was like when there were many millions of coders around the world. So many software languages, the culture of startups with whole weekends in what they called “hacker camps” where they’d compete to write an app for a phone and get money. Last week, she’d spent two hours completely revising an app on her phone, but hadn’t written a line of code. Just prompts and pulling from old code libraries.
She was glad she’d stayed away from going into IT services and admin. Now her company of 43,500 employees had one IT admin person. It barely paid above minimum wage When there were coding jobs needed, they didn’t pay well anymore. Her uncle said they used to pay great salaries and that some companies hired coders just so their competitors couldn’t. Maryam found that fascinating.
Where IT teams and software devs were fairly large in number, perhaps with hundreds, her company’s entire technology team numbered only 32, relegated to a small corner of the head office building in Halifax, a fine Canadian east coast city. She loved kayaking in the harbour on warm summer days.
She looked back now, seeing how much had changed. How it must have been such an exciting time to be alive. A subculture had existed and being in on the joke made is mysterious and exciting at the same time. No one today talked about “bug” or “spaghetti code”, references she didn’t understand that her uncle had laughed about.
Coders today weren’t vaunted or held on a pedestal like they were. The good paying jobs were few and far between. The entertainment world didn’t celebrate coders anymore. They were just a small subset of culture, perhaps not even a subculture anymore. Her uncle lamented this sometimes, saying he felt a loss fro something that had reshaped the world.
Maryam finished her tea, slowly closing the laptop and slipping it into her backpack in the early morning quiet. The sun streamed down on the cat lying with its belly up to catch the warmth. She felt lonely then with a sense of loss. She headed off to work. Maybe she could take a course in history and then write a book about the old subculture of coders? If she had kids, maybe they’d find her stories fascinating? “Mom? What’s a prompt engineer?”