Coding seemed like a superpower. You hit a bunch of keys on your keyboard, write some procedures and functions - and you build something useful. Something people appreciate because it makes their life easier.

Product Managers and people from other departments might have admired your ability to create software.

And even among developers, there might’ve been huge differences in technical skills between juniors and seniors.

But this is not the case anymore.

With AI, everybody is creating software. Be it big or small - everyone has the capability to create something to solve their own or their team’s problems. They are not at the mercy of developers anymore.

One growing confusion I see is among software developers themselves. The things that divided developers before - coding skills or architectural skills - are not so much of an issue anymore.

Even a fresher with the right tools, the right attitude, and the right guidance can ship a lot of complex and meaningful things. Sure, they might be a few days slower than an experienced developer - but give ‘em a month. That divide will become smaller and smaller.

This is not to say experienced developers have no value. They do. Their experience still matters in judgment, trade-offs, debugging ambiguous systems, and knowing what not to build.

I’m trying to address a group of developers who think everything is meaningless now - whatever skills I have built are meaningless because someone else who’s far less experienced than me can build the same things I can.

Every tool is just a means to an end. As every decade passes, the ecosystem gets better and developers spend less time dealing with tooling and friction, and more time focusing on what matters - solving a problem. Everything else is just distraction.

Engineers built programming languages, browsers, markup languages, debugging tools, communities to seek help from, books to learn from, videos to understand concepts and so on.

As every decade passes, the friction and barrier to entry for programming keeps going down.

It’s the same with AI. The only difference is that - the shift was faster and opened up a lot more possibilities than previous tooling innovations did.

There are a few shifts I can already see.

Individual Contributions

Coding output as a way of distinguishing individual contributors will diminish. It’s going to be about the impact that we create as a team. How far can we go with a lean team, without burning out and creating maximum impact for customers.

Fundamental skills

Assembly language or Vanilla JS aren’t the fundamental skills that matter.

Curiosity, navigating ambiguity, figuring things out independently, judgment, and understanding users - these are the fundamental skills.

Moving closer to customers

Software engineers should move closer to customers, understand how they use the platform, identify the friction, take it back to the drawing board, and improve the product.

It’s not about coding anymore. It’s about building something meaningful, putting it into the world and interacting with your users.

So, if you think your coding skills have become less important, that’s because they are. Programming was always a means to an end - just a tool to solve problems. Tools will evolve, so should you.