Crazy prediction: programmers who aged out of the workforce are going to become much more desirable again with AI. The typical career progression for a software developer was individual contributor, then team lead, then manager. They went from writing code to reviewing team members git check-ins to selecting tools and designing architecture. Then they got older, could not work 80 hour work weeks, started getting passed over for promotion, got burned out, left. If those people truly invest in learning AI, much of that skill and experience base immediately comes back into play. But instead of humans, they are managing agents. They are dictating how unit tests look. They are deciding architecture. They are writing coding best practices docs and style guides. They are designing and instructing coding agents, review agents, testing agents. And they are doing all this comfortably in a 40 hour work week, not an 80 hour workweek. Without a lot of the bullshit. It’s going to take some work for these gray haired dudes to acclimate. The transition is not without struggle. But for those that can, their best days are ahead of them rather than behind them.