Programmers Are Becoming Systems Guardians

This year (probably closer to the next 3 months) I think programmers should not see themselves as programmers anymore. Not even the kind that uses AI agents to “generate code” - that’s still programming, that’s still thinking your job is to “build stuff with characters on a screen”.

The Rise of Systems Guardians

I think this year programmers will more and more become “systems guardians / maintainers”. Guiding and guarding that what the end user / customer needs happens, in a dynamic environment where agents will generate most of the code, with real humans hardly inspecting it anymore.

This means that your job as programmer will be creating / instructing agents and building workflows and environments where these agents will do it safely. And steer them left or right and nudge them where they go off the path.

A New Definition of the Job

Keeping systems maintainable and reliable is your new job. In an environment where problems are solved at the speed of light.

We used to care a lot about “well factored code” because humans had to maintain them. The human factor will mostly become obsolete.

While I do think that a lot of maintainable code best practices are critical for agents to also keep doing their job. The importance of the “craft” of writing code for the humans may become obsolete very fast.

Who Will Be the Best Programmers?

The best programmers will know how to see the right path. And they will be the people who can instruct and teach agents at scale. But agents and LLMs will be the primary “audience” of writing or reading code now. So we should change our perspective of “what writing good code” means.

Maintaining the stability, effectiveness, speed, etc of the whole system is now the job of programmers. Without perhaps ever writing a single line of code again.