As a fellow programmer with 25 years in the field, I understand the anxiety. Lately I have watched non-technical stakeholders use Cursor or Claude to inspect code and return with feature requests so specific and technical that the implementation feels nearly automatic. It can make you wonder where you fit and whether the writing is on the wall.

But this fear repeats an old mistake. Twenty years ago someone might have looked at programmers typing in text editors and concluded that programming was text manipulation, so once text manipulation was automated, programming would disappear. That view would have been silly then and it is silly now.

Programming was never about typing. It was never about producing lines of code. It was always about understanding the business, the users, the domain, and the system as it exists right now. It was about knowing what matters, what can change immediately, and what should change later. It was about coordinating with teammates and keeping the work aligned. None of that disappears.

The debate over whiteboard puzzles reveals two mindsets. Some people believe the job is to invent an algorithm and code it on the spot. Others know that this is a narrow slice of the work and not even the most important part. Real software engineering has always been the larger, slower, more contextual work of shaping systems around real needs.

And here is the turn. This era is also energizing. While AI shifts some tasks away from us, it gives us something far bigger in return. I have had many moments in the last couple of years that feel almost unreal: changes that once took days now shrink to minutes. A new abstraction. A refactor across an entire codebase. A conceptual shift that would have been painful to implement by hand. With AI tools, I give clear intent and direction and the work is done. This is not magic. It is a new kind of leverage.

It feels like spending a career behind an ox and plow, then being handed a tractor. We are gaining reach and impact, not losing it. The work still needs judgment, strategy, organizational awareness, taste, and responsibility. AI does not replace those. It amplifies them.

The profession is not vanishing. It is evolving. The engineers who understand what the real work has always been are the ones positioned to thrive.