Learn to Code, They Said by Alexander Dao

[justaprogressive]

Last month, 40 policy and labor organizations took their fight for a federal framework to protect workers from AI disruptions to Capitol Hill. Led by the Economic Policy Institute, the AFL-CIO Tech Institute, and two social justice groups, We Build Progress and Workshop, they reminded members of Congress that majorities of Americans want to establish guardrails that protect jobs and states’ regulatory powers.

Since Congress hasn’t really stepped up, states are doing the heavy lifting. All 50 have introduced AI legislation in areas ranging from education and health care to criminal justice. But specific protections to shield workers from job losses are still in their infancy. Even in California, an AI law pioneer, state lawmakers are hard-pressed to keep up. One pending bill would require employers to provide 90 days’ advance notice of layoffs “before any technological displacement affecting 25 or more workers during any 30-day period.” It also would mandate that employers with more than 100 workers allow the affected individuals to apply for other positions within that organization.

Layoffs are outpacing those kinds of legislative fixes especially in the hard-hit tech sector, where there are deeper problems that need addressing. An entire generation of new graduates sold on the promise of job security in tech can’t even get their collective foot in the door before layoffs hit.

Software engineer Zaul Moayedian began his career at Paystand, a Santa Cruz–based financial tech company handling business-to-business fiat and cryptocurrency-based transactions. He started out in their blockchain department before transferring to an IT role, and then moved to an engineering team. His team began using AI roughly two years ago after company executives realized the technology could help engineers develop and push their products faster. (Disclosure: I worked with Moayedian at Paystand as a college intern with the company.)

https://prospect.org/2026/05/23/learn-to-code-they-said-ai-programming-jobs/

[highplainsdem]

1. And since AI produces code so fast, a lot of bad, insecure AI code is being shipped and used

because it doesn't get checked carefully enough by humans who understand coding.

One of the more recent warnings about this:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221255437

Use of AI for coding is dumbing down even senior software engineers and developers, and companies are laying off their junior counterparts and not hiring recent collage graduates.

Incredibly stupid.

[Celerity]

2. kick

[intheflow]

3. When I was a children's librarian about 10 years back,

it pissed me off so much that STEM programming focused on coding, and a million kid’s books came out celebrating women in tech. The emphasis on tech when agriculture and Earth sciences are sorely needed in this epoch of climate change is as delusional as it is dishonest. Computers work with finite resources, but climate change is eternal.

[meadowlander]

5. I hate to stick the boot in when a lot of software engineers are really down

but as someone who spent decades being sneered at by STEM people when I told them I majored in liberal arts and why, I hope we can spend at least a brief second reflecting on what the actual purpose of education (and life) really is.

The purpose of education is to learn to love learning and to have the tools to continue doing it for your whole life, not just to get one job you hope you hold onto forever. It's to teach you how to find a good and satisfying *life* for yourself and how to be a good citizen and functioning member of a democratic society. That's philosophy, political science, history, foreign languages, sociology, etc.

Funnily enough the pendulum has swung and those are some of the people we need the most now as we try to restructure our society to manage the almost inconceivably vast power it is going to be handed in the next five years.

The purpose of life isn't a job. It's to do the things you love and spend time with the people you love. You need a certain baseline level of material things so you can focus on that and that's all. If those things become superabundant and cheap, great. Let's stop or drastically reduce the amount of work we have to do.

When I lived in China, I'd go to my local park and see lots of people out there cutting the lawns with scissors. It's not that the city parks department couldn't afford lawnmowers. It's that they were required to employ people doing something so they came up with that.

When we lead with "protect jobs" all I see is hundreds of thousands of people in khaki overalls hunched over breaking their backs, exposing themselves to skin cancer, and giving themselves repetitive strain injuries doing pointless make work so that they can "justify" getting a salary. We are at the cusp of being able to reaffirm our inherent value as people, not just as cogs in a capitalist machine.

The AI companies have taken all of humanities collective intellectual property to create these models. We are owed a dividend that allows us to enjoy our lives with dignity. And for many, that will not include a "job" in the traditional sense. We have to be able to let go of those existing mindsets and imagine the outcome we actually want and then work towards that or we will be left behind by the next generations.

[sakabatou]

4. Learn to code, they said

Get fired/let go so business can use AI.
Business uses AI for the coding.
AI coding fails, multiple times.
Business has to rehire coders to fix the bad AI coding
Coders ask for at least double their regular salary to be rehired
Business doesn't.
Business later fails.
Business wonders how they failed.
Business blames former human workers.
Golden parachute for the C-suite, while anyone else gets fucked over.