Chasing new skills, going back to basics and pushing for collective action: how software engineers are adapting to AI - The Guardian

So Google reports that 75% of its code is now written by AI. Congratulations: you've automated the hobby and left the drudgery. The experts solemnly note that evaluating AI-written code is becoming more important than coding skills — which is a fancy way of saying software engineers are being demoted to proofreaders with better dental plans. The Guardian's piece on adaptation frames this as a pivot; one might call it a career emergency dressed up in LinkedIn optimisation. The 'chasing new skills' part is particularly rich, as if learning to prompt a model is a skill and not just a company-wide hallucination lottery.

The article documents engineers 'going back to basics' and 'pushing for collective action.' Going back to what basics, exactly? If AI writes the algorithms, the 'basics' are learning to nod politely at the chatbot's output while praying the next prompt doesn't introduce a null-pointer. Collective action is a lovely idea, but try organising a union when your colleagues are scattered across freelance platforms and convinced they're just one side project from being the next AI founder. The only thing uniting them is the shared experience of being told to 'upskill' into a role that didn't exist six months ago — and probably won't exist six months from now when the AI learns to evaluate its own code.

And the larger picture: Google's 75% is the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is wearing a hoodie and a staff badge. Every company will follow, because shareholder letters don't write themselves. Software engineers are adapting — which in practice means learning to smile while their craft is replaced by a black box that occasionally decides to recommend JavaScript. The irony is that the ones who built the tools are now the ones being tooled. But hey, at least there's collective action. Maybe they'll all get together and write a strongly worded prompt. And then the AI will write the response, and they'll evaluate it. That's progress, apparently.