AI: Your Dev Job Is More Blue-Collar Than You Think

A useful yet rarely repeated insight: software engineering is construction work with better lighting and fewer splinters. AI has only made this analogy sharper—and it’s why software engineering isn’t going anywhere, no matter how many robots we throw at it.

If you’ve ever swung a hammer on a job site, you might think at first glance, A robot could do this. Nail goes here, board goes there, repeat.

But spend five minutes actually building something, and you’ll see why that’s nonsense. Even the “standard” stuff—like slapping together a house, one of the ten million built this decade—never stays standard. The foundation’s off by an inch. The client wants a weird skylight. The last subcontractor botched the plumbing. Your boss is incompetent (he gives you incorrect prompts), but good ol’ Jim’s been here 20 years and knows where the bodies are buried. Robots don’t handle that mess. Creativity does. Humans do.

Software’s the same way. It’s not a truly difficult trade, it’s mostly just hard work.

AI Lowers the Bar to Entry (and Raises the Stakes)

This has always been true, but something changed about a year ago (don’t worry, nobody else noticed it until roughly last week either). AI has made it stupidly easy to start software engineering.

It’s like a 16-year old kid showing up to a construction site—just carry the water jugs, kid, you’ll figure it out. And don’t carry them slow.

As of this year, any intern can stumble in and brute-force their way to usefulness. Don’t get the codebase? Ask ChatGPT. Never heard of Python? Grok’s got you covered. No idea what your product even does? You guessed it—ask the AI.

This isn’t a downgrade—it’s a superpower. Just like that kid hauling water can eventually swing a hammer, the newbie prompting AI can eventually sling code. The barrier to entry is gone.

Credentials Are Losing Their Shine

When it’s that easy to get started, the old gatekeepers start looking shaky. Random people are whipping up video games over the weekend—and they’re actually kinda good.

Now tell me: what’s the point of your fancy four-year CS degree?

Do you want to hire a guy who went to “construction school” for four years, or the guy who’s actually built houses (and a lot of them)?

Experience trumps credentials when there is no barrier to entry.

The Blue-Collar Paradox of Software

So is AI making software engineering obsolete? No, it’s just making it more blue-collar.

The people won’t go away any time soon. The chaos of real-world problem-solving still demands creativity, grit, and plain old work.

Most software isn’t original at all. Just like a house, any piece of software looks like the millions that came before it. But there’s still work, problems, little things that need fixing. And some guy needs to show up (with the AI power tools) and get the job done.

Hard Work

There is a glory in hard work, and the temptation for software engineers has long been to think of themselves as ivory tower intellectuals… which usually means getting lazy.

When you realize your “creative” profession is more like construction, you can stop taking yourself so seriously and get back to work. And the work is a lot more fun.