Kevin Surace warns developers that AI can now generate tens of thousands of lines of code overnight. Learn to use these tools or get replaced by those who do. The job isn't writing code anymore, it's delivering products that work.
If you're a coder, you have 2 choices. Get this right and outperform everyone, or get replaced by someone who does. Here's what I'm hearing from coders and what we've heard really since the beginning of the year, since the latest Claude came out and they could really write 20,000 lines of code, is a coder goes home or, you know, tells it to do something in the morning and by night it's done and goes, what do I do? Like, I'm going to review this. I'm going to make sure it does what it was supposed to do. But my entire purpose was to code. I loved coding. That's what I do. And what I tell them is that that actually didn't bring you joy. What actually brought you joy was finishing the project. Right. Delivering it and seeing the smile on, you know, whoever faces that you delivered it to. And you misinterpreted the fact that you thought they cared that you struggled to write 20,000 lines of code for 6 months. They never cared how you got there. No one cares how you got there. What they care about is how fast can you get there and how fast can you deliver it to me and how much it can meet my business requirements, right? That's what everyone cares about. And so the fact that a machine can do that now, when you can control the machine means you're going to be 10 times faster. But the bottom line is you need to find your joy in the outcome. You need to find your joy in the output. You find your joy in just writing every line, good for you. No one's taking that away from you, but you might not get paid to do that anymore.
