Published: 1/20/2026

Let me preface this piece with a few clarifications on my personal stances. I do believe Large Language Model AI is a major innovation in the modern workforce. There are huge gains to be had both in productivity and ability to the engineer that adopts its use correctly. “Vibecoding” and the ability for those with less technical expertise to prototype is a massive net good for the software engineering industry. Few communities have ever suffered in the long run from lowering the barrier to entry, and many may find a passion for coding that they otherwise may not have discovered. There are many great ways to incorporate AI into your workflow as an engineer, I may talk about them at one point. Currently, much of the internet is flooded with exaggeratory and misguided predictions and opinions on AI and the broader future of both IT and software engineering, it is not my aim today to add to those numbers.

Imagine if you will, you, a seasoned carpenter find yourself in some vaguely normal home in the 1970’s. You walk to the kitchen to find a brand new “microwave oven” machine placed atop the counter, a purchase no doubt made by your cooking-obsessed spouse during your workday. Next to it lays a receipt from the local grocery store for 10 frozen dinners: some turkey and mashed potatoes, others salisbury steak and a mix of carrots and green beans. You check the freezer to verify, and inside are 10 nearly identical boxes, each exclaiming to be “Microwave Ready.”

Intrigued, you take one from the top of the stack and attempt to make it. The back of the box has no more than a few simple instructions:

• Remove film from food tray.
• Microwave on high for 2 minutes.
• Stir sides, flip meat.
• Microwave for 1 additional minute.
• Remove and enjoy.

Certainly never one to be called a chef, you follow the instructions and pray nothing catches on fire. It doesn’t.

The food is good. It’s not the best meal you’ve had and certainly no rival to your spouse’s recipes, but it is good.

It’s the next day, and you are taking a lunch break with your coworkers on the jobsite. You bring up the “microwave oven”, and the impressive quality of the meal it was able to produce with little more than a few seconds of basic effort and 3 minutes of waiting on your part. A coworker chimes in, they bought one a few weeks back as an anniversary gift.

“It certainly beats my wife’s so called cooking” he exclaims. Others laugh.

“I tell you, there’s gonna be a point in no more than 10 years where every home in America has one of these. We will never have to cook again. Think of all the time we will save. Heck, if I was a chef right about now, I’d be looking for a new job.” He adds.

Lunch hour finishes and you go back to work.

You reach for the corded drill on the workbench and begin drilling pilot holes into the slabs cut earlier in the morning with a table saw. You pick up a Phillips head screwdriver and think back to some long forgotten time where cutting and drilling were still done by hand. You begin driving screws into the now ready pieces and wonder if one day not too far off from now even screwdriving will be done faster by machines…

We never know truly what the future holds. It’s been a century since power tools became commonplace at jobsites all across the world. There are far more people working in trades now than there were back then. In fact, it has seen considerable hiring in contrast to most other professions in recent years. The modern trade worker is also no doubt significantly more productive, largely in part to continued advances in machinery.

The “microwave oven” is now so widely adopted that it is just called the “microwave” in common language and it would be hard to imagine a kitchen or office breakroom without one. Entire aisles of the grocery store are dedicated to meals specifically just for this appliance. There are scientists working around the clock at food and chemical companies to make these meals healthier, tastier, and more freezer stable. A consequence of its adoption has been a sharp reduction in the amount of freshly cooked food being consumed. Entire generations have now grown up lacking (largely by choice) the ability to cook food of comparable taste or quality, if at all. Unsurprisingly, kitchens still exist in every restaurant and home. In an era long after food was commoditized for quick convenience, the demand for quality food has never been greater.

Be skeptical of those that misconstrue a technological advance in a field with that field’s auto-extinction. AI (as it exists today) is a powerful tool for the skilled engineer, and a blackbox that generates code of impressive quality with little more than a few seconds of basic effort and 3 minutes of waiting not unlike a microwave making a TV dinner. Be careful not to over-leverage AI in place of building your own skills as an engineer. It is up to you, not executives and influencers, to dictate its utility to you and your value in a world where it exists.