"coding is dead" has been said every 6 months for 2 years and nobody cares

every six months, like clockwork, a tech billionaire climbs onto a stage and tells you coding is over. and every six months, people either panic or dunk on it on twitter, and then nothing changes, and then it happens again.

i'm tired of it. not because the question is stupid, but because nobody ever goes back and checks if the last guy was right.

the graveyard of predictions

jensen huang said in 2024 that coding is "already dead in the water" and recommended you go into biology or farming instead. farming. lmao.

then dario amodei showed up at davos in january 2026 and said AI will write 90% of code within 3-6 months, and basically all of it within a year. that's not a vague prediction either, that's a specific timeline with a specific number. sam altman said AI would be "the best coder in the world" by end of 2025. marc benioff "seriously debated" not hiring any engineers at salesforce this year.

so where's the accountability? dario said 3-6 months from january. we're in march. i'm still writing code. my side projects still have bugs that AI happily introduces and then apologizes for.

nobody asks the follow-up question

the thing that actually bothers me is that these predictions get made, they get covered breathlessly, and then when the deadline passes everyone just... moves on. there's no "hey wait, you said 6 months ago that coding would be mostly automated, what happened?" instead we just reset and wait for the next prediction.

and some of these guys have a direct financial incentive to make you believe AI is replacing everything. like of course the ceo of an AI company wants you to think AI is going to eat the world. that's his product. that's like asking your dentist if you need more fillings.

(okay maybe im being slightly dramatic but be serious for once)

what's actually happening

look, AI is changing how i code. i use it constantly. it's fast and it saves me a lot of time on stuff i'd rather not think about. but the idea that it's replacing engineers wholesale? we're not there. not even close.

the models still confidently break things, hallucinate APIs that don't exist, and fall apart when a project gets complex enough that context starts mattering. the engineers at anthropic who "don't write code anymore" are still doing the hard part — knowing what to build, why, and whether the output is correct. that's not going away.

what's actually happening is that the floor got lower. you can do more with less now. but "the floor got lower" is not the same as "the ceiling collapsed."

just say it already

i think these predictions keep getting made because fear travels faster than nuance. "AI will write all your code in 12 months" gets a million impressions. "AI is a useful tool that requires a skilled operator" gets ignored.

the people making these claims aren't dumb. they know what they're doing. and the media covering it knows that doom headlines get clicks. so the cycle keeps going and nobody ever gets held accountable when march 2026 rolls around and developers are still, y'know, developing things.

maybe in 5 years i'll look back and feel silly for writing this. maybe. but right now, in the actual present, i'm watching the same prediction get made on a loop with the serial number filed off each time, and i think someone should just say it's kind of embarrassing.