The Post-Code Generation

Written by Andrei N. Ciobanu on

26 Oct, 2026

As I watch “an agent” open a Chrome browser, start a debugging session, and try to fix a bug it just introduced, all in response to a prompt I generated with another agent, I have too much time to reflect and too many tokens to waste. I can’t help but think of the students who are now studying computer science, or who have just graduated from a technical university and are hoping to join the workforce.

The most cunning of them will find something to do. Maybe they will need to learn something about finance. Or pursue a master’s degree with more math, the fashionable kind of math. Or maybe go deeper into the hardware world. But even so, the competition is fierce, and maybe they will need to complement their hard skills with soft skills, a willingness to accept low wages, and so on. What will happen to the rest? The unlucky ones.

In a way, they are a lost generation. The prompt generation. The post-code generation. The last programmers. It’s insulting to think their generation doesn’t yet have a name.

A bunch of smart kids who probably did well in school and decided to pick the one job they liked, or the one job that could have paid them enough to justify all the effort they’d put into getting to that point in life. It doesn’t matter, although I’ve always preferred the ones who did it out of passion to those who did it for the money.

A bunch of smart kids who did everything right and are about to start their working lives with a hard skill that was hard to acquire. Now that skill has suddenly become more or less obsolete.

Too many of them won’t be hired by the end of this year. Or the beginning of the next.

And as I think more about them, while watching the agent fix its own bugs, it feels surreal to remember that three years ago I was writing an article called “My list of software projects some programmers should try.”

Or that I was taking pride in writing tutorials on how to write arcane code in C.

Or that three years ago I was debating with myself (cringe, not to be shared on the internet) whether programming was a form of art.

I even had a few heroes in this community. People who had written so much nontrivial code that they had a clear, deep understanding of what good code should look like. I read what they had to say with appreciation and a healthy dose of envy, the type of envy that pushes us to improve because we want to be like “them.” Now some of those heroes have changed completely. Some have gone silent. They stopped publishing around 2025.

I keep looking at the shoemaker in the photograph. I know nothing about his life, and it would be convenient to invent a happier one for the sake of this article. But I recognize the wish that makes me look at him: to learn something difficult, become useful to other people, and have that usefulness last long enough to build a life around it. It’s a modest wish, a deeply human wish.

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