The Daily The Workers Letting A.I. Do Their Jobs
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Apr 14, 2026 
Clive Thompson, a technology and science writer for Wired and Smithsonian, explores why many programmers now let A.I. handle much of the coding. He looks at developers becoming architects and editors instead of typists. He also gets into prompting as a new skill, fears about losing expertise, pressure on junior roles, and what cheaper software could unleash.
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Coders Are Rapidly Stopping Coding By Hand
- Clive Thompson found many programmers now outsource much of their daily coding to AI, and some write almost none themselves.
- After interviewing about 75 developers, he found most felt exhilarated, not demoralized, because AI let them turn plain-English ideas into working code within minutes.
Programming Has Entered A New Abstraction Layer
- AI coding marks the biggest abstraction shift in programming, moving work from writing instructions to supervising swarms of agents.
- Clive Thompson contrasts rewiring ENIAC by hand with modern systems that spawn sub-agents to write, test, debug, and return finished code.
Two-Person Startups Now Build At Astonishing Speed
- At tiny startups, AI can compress a full day of feature work into about half an hour and make two-person teams move up to 20 times faster.
- Developers told Clive Thompson they now generate many options, compare them, and feel less like construction workers and more like architects.