Programmers laugh at idea they'll automate themselves into extinction, LinkedIn post humor
Description
Screenshot of a dark-mode LinkedIn-style feed. Across the top is a strip of tiny profile pictures with the text “Kelly Kochanski, Phillip Remaker and Alec Cawley upvoted · 2h.” The post by “Carey Aydelotte • Follow” (subtitle “humanish · Sun”) features a bold headline: “Will software engineers ever stop being in demand?” The body reads: “There are two schools of thought. Those with a background in business see developers as commodities and fully believe that programmers will program themselves out of a job field. The idea is that in some distant future, jobs like project manager, product manager, and marketing manager will still be critical but programmers themselves will be extinct as a result of the tools they created. The other school of thought is hard to understand because the programmers are laughing so hard they can’t talk.” Below, engagement metrics show “13.4K views • View 964 upvotes • View 4 shares,” followed by avatar reactions and icons indicating 964 upvotes, 4 comments, and 34 shares. Visually minimalistic with white text on charcoal background, the meme satirizes repeated predictions that AI, low-code, or automation will eliminate developer roles, a notion seasoned engineers find absurdly humorous
Comments
6Comment deleted
I’ll start fearing “developer extinction” the day a no-code tool wakes up to a 3 AM pager, hot-patches a 12-year-old Perl cron monster, and files its own RCA before stand-up
The same people who think AI will replace programmers are still waiting for Excel to replace accountants and PowerPoint to replace consultants
Ah yes, the classic 'developers will automate themselves out of existence' take - usually from folks who think AI will replace programmers right after it finishes debugging its own hallucinations. Meanwhile, senior engineers are still explaining why 'just use AI to write it' doesn't account for the 47 edge cases, the legacy system integration, the compliance requirements, or the fact that someone needs to prompt-engineer the AI, review its output, fix its mistakes, and maintain the resulting technical debt. But sure, we'll all be obsolete right after we finish building the tools that supposedly replace us - a paradox so delicious it pairs perfectly with our 3 AM production incident coffee
Engineers vanish only in slides. In prod, every “no‑code” tool creates two new codebases: the SDK and the incident runbook
We’ll automate ourselves out of work the day backlog(t+1) < backlog(t) despite PM-driven scope inflation - so pencil that in for the heat-death milestone
AI might 'program' the PMs, but it'll still page us at 3AM when the distributed system elects a partition-tolerant manager