Andy Balaam makes programming videos and has been writing code for decades. His short essay is not an argument about whether AI works, and not an ethics piece — it is about how the last couple of years have felt, and he is blunt that the sadness has been AI’s single biggest effect on his life. Bigger, he says, than any concrete change to his actual work.

He traces that feeling to disrespect rather than fear:

  • Programming was his hobby, his job and his identity — proof of value, of being good at something and getting better at it.
  • The industry message is now that the skill is obsolete, that the only serious path is to stop coding and rent coding from someone else’s machine, because it is a commodity.
  • What stings is that the thing he loves is being reframed as a rented utility, not that a tool got better.

He is honest about the limits of that grievance. Farmers, nurses, drivers, carers, teachers, cleaners and parents were never given that respect in the first place — he is late to the party, and he says plainly that it was naive and self-centred to be surprised that bosses were so eager to replace workers like him with an imitation.

The second half of the piece is deliberately hopeful, aimed at three audiences: himself, people who code for the love of it, and people learning to build a career. His argument to learners is simple. The thinking coding trains — building complex systems, taking them apart, fixing them — stays valuable no matter how good the models get, and knowing how code actually works stays valuable too. His analogy is compilers: writing compilers did not end the need to understand machine code; engineers today understand memory, pipelines and locality far more deeply than anyone did when compilers arrived. Two of his children are heading for programming careers, and he is not worried.

The value of the essay is that it puts a name on a feeling a lot of working programmers have but rarely say out loud, and then refuses to leave it there. If “Don’t Be a Meat Proxy” is about what happens to your judgment when the tool does the work, this one is about what happens to your sense of worth — and its answer is that the love and the skill are yours, and no model release takes them.