Congratulations, We Can't Write Code Anymore

I don't have an answer...

If you follow the newsletter, you know this. In the newsletter, I try to talk about problems and show a way out that makes sense to me. I can’t do this in this newsletter. Because honestly, I don’t have an answer either.

The other day, I was talking with a friend, and we came to the same place again. We always come to the same place, actually. Inside the company, on X, in face-to-face talks, at events, and sometimes in small talk. The topic is always the same: layoffs, junior developers who can’t find jobs, people who must work longer before retirement, people who work abroad and see their stock options become worthless paper, and so on. Our industry has been talking about the same thing for some time. I think we have never had a time like this before.

First, About Myself

For years, I had the same plan in my mind: one day, when I am far enough from the company, I will work on my own open source projects. Maybe I will send PRs to other people’s projects. Maybe I will have small projects that I take care of myself. Not for money, but for something else. I was thinking about this like a kind of retirement plan. Not a money plan, but a meaning plan.

That plan is gone now.

People who follow the open source world saw these changes. In February, GitHub quietly added a new setting: projects can now close the PR system completely. Because they really needed it. The cURL project has a security team of seven people. They saw that 20% of the security reports they got were made by AI, and only 5% of these described a real problem. After this, Daniel Stenberg closed the “bug bounty” program in January. The name of the blog post he wrote about this says everything: Death by a Thousand Slops. Mitchell Hashimoto also banned this in his new project Ghostty. Steve Ruiz started to automatically close PRs from outside in tldraw. Even Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, openly said that he cannot manage the PRs coming to his own projects. Think about it — he is the man who sells AI agents. The reason is always the same: low-quality, often meaningless PRs made by AI killed the real contributions. In March 2026 alone, 17 million AI PRs were opened on GitHub. Six months ago, this number was 4 million.

What is a PR? It is short for “Pull Request.” It is the way someone from outside can add code to an open source project. You make a change, you send it, the project owner looks at it, and then accepts or rejects it. It is the basic flow system of open source.

So the sentence “I will contribute to open source when I retire” is losing its meaning slowly. Because there is no community to contribute to anymore. With vibe coding, packages are written by agents. Nobody writes documents. Nobody opens issues. Nobody knows the person on the other side. The feedback loop is broken. And the community is slowly becoming quiet.

This was my retirement plan. Now it is cancelled.

The Real Sadness Is Somewhere Else

But I am still lucky. I am sad about a retirement dream that didn’t happen. The real sadness is somewhere else.

On one side, there are junior developers. I mean young new graduates. The easiest position for AI to take is entry-level jobs. Companies don’t hire new graduates anymore. The salaries given to the ones who get hired are really funny — in a bad way. The entry door of this industry is almost closed. Nobody wants to talk about what this means in ten years: nobody is coming from the bottom, and we will see this in 2032.

On the other side, there are senior engineers. For the first time in Microsoft’s history, the company opened a voluntary retirement program. A 51-year-old company, for the first time. They asked 8,750 people who fit the rules, “Do you want to leave?” Some people want to leave, but I think more people don’t. In California, the time a senior engineer needs to find a job grew from 38 days to 67 days in the last two quarters. Two years ago, we would have laughed at this number.

And there is also this group: people in San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin who worked at a startup for years and planned to retire with stock options. People who got hired in 2021 with cheap money are lucky. After that, things are really bad. For people working at startups that are not AI companies, it is not clear when their stocks will give real profit. Well, is there any startup left that is not AI? That is another question.

The Irony

And there is also this irony. As software developers, for decades, we had only one dream: to write less code. High-level languages came. Frameworks came. Abstractions, ORMs, code completers, generators, low-code, no-code came. Every new layer came with the same promise: “You won’t have to write this anymore.” We always wrote a little less. We always worried a little less.

Congratulations, we did it... We can’t write code anymore.

I Don’t Have an Answer

Some people will wait for me to show a way out, to say “but do this.” I won’t do it. Because I can’t. I don’t have a way out either.

Maybe this: even accepting this is a starting point. Accepting that the golden age of our industry is over, that the new one has not started, and that we are standing in an empty space in between. Nobody has an idea about what to do in this empty space. Not even the managers of big companies. They are trying to buy more chips and use more tokens. And while they do this, they are sending people away.

If I had an answer, I would write it. But I don’t.