The Trick to Future-Proof your Coding Career Against AI

Get yourself into an area that requires deep domain expertise, working on things that haven't been done or even thoroughly imagined yet.

I’m always surprised when I hear programmers worry about AI coding tools taking their jobs.

If that sounds like you, then here’s the trick to future-proofing your career:

Get yourself into an area that requires deep domain expertise, working on things that haven’t been done or even thoroughly imagined yet.

That’s the situation I’m in. In my experience, AI coding tools choke on anything outside of standard logic that you’d commonly see in other codebases (and there is shockingly little of that in what I’m working on).

… and you know what, I’m just gonna come out and say it:

Nobody who’s building something with high future value is worried about AI taking their job.

When you’re in that setting, building stuff expands your opportunity surface area to build even higher-value stuff.

The more you do, the more there is to do.

The more of your work AI takes, the more work you have left to do.

But unfortunately, things with high future value are the hardest to automate because they typically haven’t been done or even thoroughly imagined yet.

So basically you’re safe from AI doing your work, and you’re sad about that.