The Code Monkey is dead. (Please pause 3:48 to mourn him.)
I do not mean developers. I mean the version of the job where your value was that you could sit down and make the machine do the thing. Ticket in. Code out. A code machine that runs on Fritos and Mountain Dew. I know that machine. I was that machine.
The scarce skill was producing the lines fast enough and correct enough that the business kept paying you to produce them.
That skill is not scarce anymore. Anyone with a decent set of agents can get working code. I watch it happen every day. I write zero lines of production code and I still ship things.
So people keep saying the developer is dead. They have the wrong noun.
I have been doing this since the mid-80s. I have been the person in that chair. And I have been the person who left that chair and still had to decide what gets built, what gets killed, and whether the thing that came back works. That second list was always the job. The typing was how we got there. It was never the point.
A good developer knows what to build. They know what to leave on the floor. They can tell when something is off before it has a name. They understand the architecture, the tradeoffs, the risk, and enough of the business to argue with it. And when it hits production, it has their name on it.
An agent can type. It cannot carry that list. It will not be the one on the hook at 3am. You will.
I am not mourning a craft. The craft moved. If you are still trying to win by being the fastest typist in the room, you are competing for a job that's already gone.
The Code Monkey is dead. Good. Now go be a developer.
Originally posted on LinkedIn: "The Code Monkey is dead."