Forget Programming. What is the Future of the Programmer?

Years go by and in the software development world we ask the same question: “What is the future of programming?”. For this answer we always had the hot topic of each moment. Cloud computing was a hot topic in 2010. When I was in college Big Data and IoT were the trend, then Deep Learning, NFTs and so on. You can even divide the eras of technology by looking at the trending topic of each period. But now in 2026 there is a topic that arrived in full force and is already the reality of the market and changed the technology field forever: Artificial Intelligence.

The goal of this post is not to discuss whether AI is the future or not because the answer is simple: it is already the present. OpenAI, Google Gemini and Anthropic are all companies and subdivisions that are already part of our daily lives. This goes beyond programming. Many people use them for support when writing an email, to profane the legacy of Studio Ghibli or as a search service instead of Google. And naturally the main use case and the one that moves the AI market the most is the use of generative artificial intelligence for code. Then that obvious question invades the programmer’s mind: “What will be MY future?”. Here we have to divide the developer landscape into two large groups: the juniors or those looking to enter the industry and those who are already mid level or senior with industry knowledge.

For the junior? Bad news friends. I believe it has never been as difficult to enter the market as it is today. For companies a 20 dollar license for Claude Code is enough to eliminate a junior position. Companies do not care about education as they want short term results. Because of this the role of the junior was always a necessary evil and even a kind of bet. Finding a beginner professional who is an outlier for the capitalist means finding the perfect worker: someone who performs above their capabilities while earning the minimum possible. There are several articles on the subject and it is not the focus of this post. However if you are a junior or want to enter the programming world read the following paragraph carefully. It will not help you in the industry but you will understand what the profile of the future programmer looks like.

Are you a senior? Grab a seat because here comes a story. The game has changed. We know that the word programmer does not represent our actual work. There are several terms for this such as software engineer, software developer or software architect. But the term that will come closest to what we will become is SYSTEMS ANALYST. Pay close attention to the word analyst. Forget about code and everything that is part of that construction. You will not be part of the construction but rather its supervisor. Forget about the number of lines of code, pair programming and other factory floor terms. Your role will be to supervise the work of AIs and with a macro view answer the following questions:

• Are your AIs working on the correct activity?
• Are your applications performing well?
• Do your applications have a high level of reliability?
• Are your AIs spending too much money?
• What is the rework level of the AIs? What is the cost tied to this?

Our role will transition from being a part of this process to being the owner of the process. You will answer for the metrics I mentioned above. To do this you must forget about whether you can manually write the most performant and wonderful code possible. Those will be skills of the past. You must understand the scenario as a whole and you will rely on something that those entering the market now do not have: knowledge of the factory floor.

If you are a senior you will probably spend more time solving other work related issues than actually writing code. For those who spend even more time on these other activities like tech leaders or systems architects I can say that yes, if you go back today to write code from scratch you might take some time reviewing new concepts or new features. However I am sure that you know absolutely how good code should look, which pattern to choose for each project and what is important versus what is not. This is the knowledge that will make the difference in your work.

In short we will become mere project managers and the chain below us will be entirely composed of AI. Is this good? FUCK NO, of course not. This is the ultimate peak of labor precarization. We will answer for unpredictable models that will hallucinate more or less depending on what your company considers necessary to invest in them. New systems analysts will grow up without ever having stepped on the factory floor. At the first emergency alarm such as an AI going offline or exceeding the weekly token limit they will not know what to do to fix the machinery.

The future is a disaster. I hope that everyone who has to play this game gets the money to buy a small farm and move away as fast as possible before being discarded by the next technological trend.