The tech world never stops moving, and every couple of years somebody swears that “coding is dead”. Spoiler: it never is. What actually happens is a radical, sometimes uncomfortable, always fascinating transformation.
AI, multi-agent SPARC tools, and a new set of expectations are reshaping the craft, and why that is worth celebrating rather than fearing.
The Declining Value of a Line of Code and the Rise of AI
There was a time when writing code felt like machining an engine by hand, line after painstaking line. You got brain pain but you were happy. Even a tiny to-do item could hide twenty hours of tinkering, and the knowledge you built up made you a prized hire.
Then the AI blitz happened:
- GitHub Copilot took autocompletion to a new level. It predicts what you want, fills in boilerplate, and saves oceans of typos. Try it once and working without it feels like typing with ski-gloves.
- The “monster” ChatGPT arrived next. It annihilated the need to hoard arcane trivia, because it always seems to have the right answer ready. Entire projects, stack traces, or obscure compile errors? Ask, copy, move on.
- AI-powered IDEs like Windsurf or Cursor let you ditch the keyboard almost entirely. You talk in long prompts, they ship proof-of-concepts in minutes. A job that cost you two days of sweat now pops out in ten minutes.
When a tool can spit out perfect syntax on demand, the market price of a single line of code plummets. Many devs feel a pang of nostalgia as once-glorious challenges melt away in seconds.
The Next Wave: Multi-Agent and SPARC Tools
Just when chat-based helpers looked unbeatable, the SPARC (Self-Prompting Agent Reasoning and Collaboration) paradigm showed up. Tools like Roo Code, and several shiny newcomers spin up swarms of cooperating agents. One writes tests, one refactors, another updates docs, while a planner agent keeps them aligned with your spec.
Because these agents coordinate, they handle the whole life-cycle out of the box. Single assistants such as Google Code Assist already feel quaint. This isn’t “very soon”, it’s already the new paradigm: you don’t just chat with an assistant anymore, you brief an artificial project team.
From Carpenter to Architect: A New Vocation
AI boosts productivity but can also drain the thrill. The hard problems that once lit up your day now bring nothing because the bot fixes them instantly. That almost‑permanent puzzle‑solving fuel has faded, making some of us feel less alive in the job.
Yet the client only cares about solved problems, not heroics. Our craft is shifting toward perspective. Think of the transition from carpenter to architect: swinging a hammer matters less, while understanding load‑bearing structures and envisioning how everything fits together matter more. The real joy now is launching something that brings visible value to users.
Old joke: a junior writes one thousand lines per week, a senior fifty, yet the senior costs more. Why? They spend time thinking instead of typing. Today AI can crank out thousands of lines without blinking. You still need someone who decides which fifty matter.
Architecture: The Indispensable Key Skill
Every “developer-killing” wave created fresh specialisations:
- No-code/Low-code platforms led to experts who design data models, integrate edge-cases, and earn more than the coders they “replaced”.
- Cloud didn’t erase sysadmins; it turned them into DevOps engineers, scripting infra and pipelines with fatter paychecks.
- Offshoring cut costs until people realised context and communication matter, pushing companies back toward mixed or distributed teams.
AI follows the same pattern. It produces plausible code but often with weak architecture or sneaky inconsistencies. Someone must verify, refactor, secure, and maintain that flood. AI excels at local optimisation but fails at global design. When implementation speed jumps, bad decisions pile up faster.
For disposable landing pages that is fine; for long-lived systems it is catastrophic. Solid system architecture is the one skill the bots still lack, and its value grows as code generation accelerates.
The 360-Degree Developer: More Than a Coder
Large organisations already weigh coding at about twenty percent of a dev’s evaluation. The rest covers transversal skills:
- Understanding the product and proposing features
- Collaborating across teams
- Mentoring and levelling up others
- Keeping a strategic, big-picture view
- Boosting company visibility through talks, articles, or open-source
- Leading or managing when needed
- Thinking like an entrepreneur and spotting business value
AI narrows the gap between juniors and seniors on raw code. That makes mentoring, reviews, and vision even more crucial.
So, Is Coding Dead?
Being a developer in 2025 barely resembles the role in 2023. The richness of the profession sits in teamwork, vision, and strategy. These qualities AI is nowhere near replacing. Sure, the “super coder” aura is fading, but that frees up room for no-coders, vibe-coders, and old-school devs alike to tackle bigger, more interesting problems.
If you can step back, see the system, and guide a swarm of human and artificial specialists toward a goal, you are more relevant than ever.
The code you personally type may shrink, yet your impact can explode.
Pick up the blueprint, architect. The skyline is waiting.