Had a conversation with a veteran programmer with decades of experience

Today I met a veteran programmer with decades of experience. At the beginning, when he learned that I work in the IT industry and am currently looking for a job, he even offered to introduce an opportunity to me. Later, he asked about my thoughts on AI programming. I’m a huge advocate for AI coding, so I told him I honestly don't write much code anymore. because I’ve found that AI often does the job better than I can. Now I focus more on achieving results rather than personally writing every line of code.

His tone started getting weird, though I didn't catch it at the time. He asked, 'So if AI does the job better than us, then nobody needs programmers and we all lose our jobs?'

I answered, 'I don't know, but it's an unstoppable trend. Maybe traditional programmers won't be needed, but DevOps will always be necessary since not everyone is good with hardware and systems.'

We moved on to other topics, but before we finished, I asked if his company was hiring. He replied, 'Yes, we are. But we hire people who write code, not people who rely on AI.'

I was so focused on the debate that I missed the vibe. Later, a friend who heard the conversation told me I was way too direct. It just hit me: I had inadvertently devalued his past experience, basically implying that the skills he spent decades building were now useless."