By Joel Khalili
Publication Date: 2026-05-28 11:00:00
As Danielle adjusted to the rhythms of new motherhood, her career underwent a dramatic reinvention.
Danielle, who asked that her first name be used to avoid affecting her job prospects, worked as a software engineer at an automaker in Portland, Oregon. Before she left the workforce in mid-2024, hardly anyone was using AI to write code; By the time she was ready to return a year later, it had become an expectation. She had previously been drawn to programming because of the job security it offered, but AI threatened to turn that on its head. “The skills that I had learned – routine development skills – we should now outsource to AI,” says Danielle.
The world’s largest AI companies anticipate a future where pretty much everything is “vibe-encoded.” In April, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI would write the majority of meta code within the next 18 months. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently told WIRED that he expects AI coding to become “one of those rare multi-trillion-dollar markets.”
The dizzying…