Surviving as a Human in the Age of AI
This is a submission for the 2026 WeCoded Challenge: Echoes of Experience
There's a palpable feeling of anxiety in developer communities right now as concrete programming skills that we have painstakingly built either through study or experience appear to now be ... kaput. Outdated. Irrelevant. Passé.
Andrej Karpathy described the feeling of watching his manual coding ability "slowly degenerating," as a personal sense of loss as AI tools take over coding work: "I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually".source
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmitt expresses shock at watching AI zip through programming tasks that he used to have to hand-code: "I've been doing programming for 55 years. To see something something start and end in front of your own life is really profound." source
Developers of all stripes are coming to the realization that being "just a coder" is no longer enough; new skills of systems thinking and architecture, plus that vague concept of 'taste' are starting to factor heavily in success in this industry. Students, as usual, are quickest to come to this realization, and Computer Science programs are rapidly either evolving or depopulating. Students are also feeling the brunt of this rapid change as narratives they were told as freshmen no longer hold true by the time they reach their senior year.
It's a tough time to [just] code.
Laughs in Humanities PhD.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose [The more things change, the more they remain the same]
A tale of two pathways
Let me tell you a little story. It's the tale of someone who followed her heart her entire career.
When I was 16, I went to France, and was swept away while visiting Chartres cathedral. True story. Growing up in a pretty privileged environment, with parents encouraging me to follow my dream, I studied for 6 years post-bachelors degree before achieving my PhD in French literature from Cal Berkeley in 1998.
Even during my tenure in graduate school in the 90s, it was clear that Silicon Valley was the hub of some really exciting stuff and that a seismic shift was occurring in the dot-com-boom. But we in our ivory tower looked slightly askance at the fellow in Scandinavian Studies who ditched his PhD program to join a hot startup way back then. We were that confident that our skills would be valued. Anyway Scandinavian Studies is far less relevant than French Studies, everybody knows that.
We of course didn't realize that humanities PhD programs in the languages are primarily designed to ensure a stream of cost-effective [read: crazy cheap] TAs (GSIs - graduate student instructors, as we called ourselves after unionizing). We were on the front lines of language learning, teaching a section of French 1 or 2 every day, coupled with mandatory pedagogy training, so that Cal undergrads could get through their language requirement. With the hope that we'd be able to graduate and land a tenure-track position, we put up with a lot, relying on this scanty income to keep food on the table and rent checks covered for a room in a West Berkeley two-storey.
Here is some lore: that house on Roosevelt Ave had a can of peaches that had to have been a decade old, a gift from every successive wave of grad students who rented the house. I wonder if it's still there.
Most of us were unwilling to understand that the academic job market was weak and getting weaker by the year, although there were signs.
We really didn't want to hear the gospel
One wake-up call to me was watching a colleague and her husband, after graduating, accept one teaching job between them. Another was watching another colleague getting thinner and thinner as he was quite literally going hungry to cover his family's expenses while part-time teaching.
Unsurprisingly, given our blinders, the bottom falling out from what was left of the job market, and the other considerable headwinds (I see you, Adjuncting!), the academic job market kicked my rear. Within a few years I threw in the towel and retrained as a web developer, catching that dot-com-boom at its tail end, restarting from scratch. In those days, you could take courses in web design online from Macromedia University, an early training program, and find an entry-level job in a completely new industry.
I worked my way up the corporate ladder (stories for another day) over the subsequent 25 years, but I won't say that I haven't yearned every day for what I gave up. Mourning the loss of a dream. Wondering "what might have been". Reconsidering the choice to pivot every time I hit a career bump, and being tempted to try to go back to some form of teaching. Coping with accusations of having sold out.
Ubi Sunt
This long preamble is meant to emphasize that where you come from will most likely have very little relationship to where you are going in your career in the long run, especially in this fast-moving age of dramatic technical change - much faster and probably even more disruptive than the dot-com-boom of the early 2000s.
The current anxiety and nostalgia permeating the tech discourse boils down to this tweet:
One benefit of having a background in a field other than where you wind up working is that you can lean on your previous knowledge base to bring insights to your work. Because really, there is nothing new here. The sentiment of loss and nostalgic mourning is explored over and over again in literature - the motif even has a name, 'Ubi sunt'. The 10th century poem The Wanderer expresses this trope with exquisite sadness:
"Where is the horse gone? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast? Where are the revels in the hall?
[...] How that time has passed away,
grown dark under cover of night, as if it had never been."
In a world grown old and dark, where is the greatness of our past? And was the past great at all, if it can disappear without a trace, as if it had never existed?
The 10th century manuscript containing The Wanderer, the Exeter Book. The word "Eardsteppan" translates to "Wanderer", in the usual Old English "kenning" where two words are put together to refer to one thing. In this case the "earth stepper" is the wanderer.
In the 15th century in Middle French, François Villon borrows the Ubi Sunt trope to mourn the great ladies of the past, comparing them to those of the present day:
"Where is the very wise Héloïse,
For whom was castrated, and then made a monk,
Peter Abelard in Saint-Denis?
For his love he suffered this sentence.
Similarly, where is the Queen
Who ordered that Buridan
Be thrown in a sack into the Seine?
Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear!"
Villon was a slippery character who had several run-ins with the law, and he seems to be not so much mourning the past as reminding us that returning to it might get you chucked into the Seine.
"Student, poet, housebreaker" - an early print manuscript of Villon's works from 1489, in Paris BNF.
Still, if 10th century Anglo Saxon poets dwelling in a much more uncomfortable world felt a profound sense of regret for a (probably) even more uncomfortable past, we in our ergonometric chairs battling Cursor also have the right to feel a degree of loss, a "slow degeneration" à la Karpathy. We can perhaps express ourselves using a literary trope that's over 1000 years old. But we ought to be able to put this anxiety into perspective, as Villon insinuates that we should. This brings me to my second point.
All The Feels
We have the right to feel all the feels that AI is making us feel - sad, useless, confused, stressed at its speed-of-light implementations, upset at the instability in the job market as we are threatened with AI-powered [sic] wave after wave of layoffs, worried for the next generation of early-career folks clawing their way up through the ranks in a very different world.
But I would posit that we, the dispossessed diaspora of ex-Humanities academics, have something to contribute here. We, too, trained for years only to be met with a job market that resolutely turned its back on us. And there isn't a day that I don't mourn that this happened, as I mentioned above. But I found ways to cope, and that has been to bring the skills of my own lived and learned experience to bear on an ever-evolving professional landscape.
One coping mechanism for me has been to attempt to bridge these two worlds by bringing the humanities into tech, because the lessons I learned there apply universally - such as those lessons around close reading, translating syntax, and the power of interdisciplinarity.
The Interdisciplinarian
Consider your past experience as a way to inform your present situation. In the near future, tech is going to look very different from how it does now. The job of the programmer will lean into more architecture than hand-coding. But your hard-won skills will still resonate in your day to day activities; rather than becoming obsolete, your programming skills will simply be applied in a different context.
You will have to lean into your accumulation of knowledge. Know that parts of it will apply, be ready to learn anew, and accept that the only thing that never changes is the fact that things will change. Well, and also death. And probably taxes.
As Emily Dickinson (whose poetry is well-studied from a data science context) well knew:
All but Death can be
Adjusted ;
Dynasties repaired,
Systems settled in their
Sockets,
Centuries removed, —
Wastes of lives resown
With colors
By superior springs,
Death — unto itself exception —
Is exempt from change.
-- 89
To put a corporate stamp on it, the old exhortation to bring your whole self to work applies, now more than ever. The workplace has need of all of us with all of our interesting, strange, diverse, warty, emotional, and overwhelmingly human perspectives as our professions will be shaped increasingly by the collective that is AI. Embrace your interdisciplinarity, lean into it. I wish you great success. And please take care of yourself and each other.