AI Agents took my programming job. What can I do?

Question

I had a customer meeting today, and the customer announced that he did not need me. He did everything he wanted in 2 days.Things I don't really believe in:>Someone needs to tell the AI what to do and check. No... I'm a middle man, I actually make it worse because we are playing telephone.>I can train people how to set up, use AI, and do it safely. No... Claude is going to build their own OpenClaw-like system.Maybe I can work for some gigantic company, but I sank a few years into my own company that was doing well making custom software.My question:What is the value that experienced programmers are going to provide?

rcvassallo83 · Accepted Answer

Curious, what did you do for this customer? Are they technologically sophisticated? Do they have a lot of users for what they built, or are they building tools used internally by a handful of people?
For simple tasks and code that doesn't change much over time, programmers don't add a lot of value over what an LLM can provide. It's easy to prompt your way to a good-enough tool for a small and exclusive set of users. Managing complexity beyond that is where a real programmer provides value.
Experienced developers provide a deep understanding of what's possible, knowing what to build, how to avoid pitfalls, how to adapt to new requirements. The expertise is in managing projects that evolve over time, meet the needs of hundreds to thousands of users, interact with external systems, have meaningful compliance, performance, and security requirements, etc.

george_api_dev · Answer

The irony is that AI agents are actually creating a new class of tools that need human operators who understand the domain. I work in web scraping/data intelligence - AI helps generate code faster, but knowing WHAT to scrape, how to handle anti-bot measures, and how to structure data for specific use cases (compliance, lead gen, market research) still requires deep human judgment.My advice: lean into the areas where AI is a tool multiplier, not a replacement. Domain expertise + AI tools = more valuable than either alone.