– Your kid’s future job hasn’t been invented yet!
When I heard this line on a podcast, I kept thinking about it for days, and honestly, I have to admit—it’s one of the few truths I’ve heard recently.
Back in the 90s, when I was born, nobody dreamed of being a Biomedical Scientist, let alone a Social Media Manager. Programmers existed, sure, but they didn’t have fancy RGB setups or those height-adjustable desks.
Floppy disks 💾, MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Cobol, Fortran, and Assembly were some of the technologies of the time.
And you know what? They still exist. Every now and then we hear urban legends about people still programming in Cobol. But for the majority, those technologies are basically extinct—replaced by modern ones like MacOS, C#, JavaScript, Swift, Docker, Cloud, and the list goes on.
So maybe what becomes extinct isn’t the profession itself, but how it’s executed.
Take the calculator, invented in 1642. I can imagine many mathematicians, accountants, and other professionals of the time—who used pen and paper for every calculation—felt threatened, and yes, many probably lost their jobs. But the professions didn’t vanish. They’re still around today, just armed with calculators, full systems, and endless automation tools.
With that in mind, and thinking about today’s generative AI hype, I believe we’ve already moved past that initial apocalyptic phase where people swore AI would completely replace programmers, leaving us jobless, with a lone entrepreneur (“that CEO who thinks outside the box”) spinning up entire applications in minutes.
In reality, after using AI daily for both professional and personal tasks, I can confirm: yes, it will replace us. But not in the way you think.
What AI will take over are the boring, repetitive, manual tasks.
We’ll move from this:
Writing a 5-line method in C# that takes two INT parameters and returns the sum in an INT variable.
To this:
Create a method that sums two numbers.
And then to this:
Now add validations. Then create unit tests. Don’t forget security checks. Finally, build a screen to take inputs, show the result, and add a green button to trigger the calculation. Oh, and commit and push it, please!
I don’t need to specify the language. It already knows from context. I don’t need to tell it how many parameters, what it returns, or the type. It already knows!
With a bit of fine-tuning—and the help of an agent—you’ll only need to give that command once. From then on, it learns and automates the same workflow.
In that sense, it becomes your coding assistant—whether that’s ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or maybe Copilot…
So what’s our new profession? Allow me to introduce: The Orchestrator.
Or maybe Prompt Engineer, AI Engineer, or just sticking with the classic: Software Engineer.
And yes, it makes total sense ✨
Instead of writing numbers on paper and doing the math manually, we use a calculator. We care about the result, not the process.
Like a conductor leading an orchestra 🎻, we know how the music should be played. We know the outcome to aim for. We’ll be the reviewers. We understand security requirements. We know what humans actually like.
And AI? Just like the musicians in the orchestra, it will be our assistant in creating great performances. 🎼
— Created by a human. Created by Álvaro Montenegro. Translated by ChatGPT.
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