When I lost my job, I learned to code. Now AI doom mongers are trying to scare me all over again | Tristan Cross

Silicon Valley wants to make us believe humans are predictable and our skills replaceable. I’ve learned that’s nonsense

I spent the best part of the 2010s working in new media, which – if you enjoyed being repeatedly laid off and then being inundated with jeering messages inveigling you to “learn to code” because your industry was doomed – was a great big laugh. Eventually, the fun began to wear off and in an act of subversive defiance (or cowardly resignation), I took their goading advice, learned to code and pivoted to what I’d hoped would be a far more secure career in “web development”, only for recent advances in AI to supposedly render coding jobs a waste of time, too. It seems I have accidentally timed my career change to coincide with a mass rollout of AI chatbots that have also learned to code, and that are – in many respects – already far better at it than me.

Code can appear alarming to the uninitiated: inscrutable “languages” that mostly read like a calculator having a stroke, but, according to AI’s most fervent evangelists, they no longer need represent any barrier at all. Why bother wrapping your head around the needlessly convoluted nerdspeak required to display white text on a black background, when you can now simply ask a chatbot to do this in layperson’s terms and it will promptly serve up your code, complete with instructions?

Tristan Cross is a Welsh writer based in London