It's August 2026, and everywhere you look people are saying that coding is dead.
Go on Reddit and you'll find plenty of people telling you that software development is over. Browse X, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and it's impossible to ignore how bad the job market has become. While jobs are scarce in both computer science and IT in general, just spend a few minutes on Reddit communities like r/recruitinghell and you'll quickly understand that the hiring market is pretty much in the toilet.
But here's the thing: a terrible job market does not mean coding is dead.
Companies still need people who know how to build software. You still need to understand data structures and algorithms. You still need to know the TCP/IP stack, the OSI model, and networking in general. AI hasn't changed those fundamentals.
Has AI made our lives easier? Absolutely.
But we still need top-tier engineers who actually understand how software works.
Will coding be dead in one, two, or three years? Honestly, no one knows.
Right now, vibe coding is all the rage. Companies are encouraging—or outright requiring—their developers to use GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or whatever the next AI tool happens to be. That's fine. These tools are incredible. But you still need to know how to code. If you don't understand what's happening under the hood, AI can only take you so far.
I do miss the days when I'd sit back and spend hours trying to solve a difficult problem on my own. There was something satisfying about finally figuring it out.
What I don't miss are the days of spending countless hours debugging an issue or building a feature, only for management to say, "We decided we don't want that product anymore."
So while there are definitely moments of nostalgia, I also enjoy being able to build products several times faster than I could before. AI has removed a lot of the repetitive work, and that's a good thing.
If you enjoy coding without AI, keep doing it. Solve coding problems for fun. Build projects because you enjoy building them. Learn how things work under the hood.
Coding isn't dead, at least not yet!
It's just changing.