I have been working as a software engineer for a few decades, and it is mind-boggling to see how much coding has changed in the past year. Coding is only one part of software engineering, but maybe the most prestigious one. And it‘s all but gone. I now only write code when it requires fewer keystrokes than the corresponding prompt in the AI chat. It is a bit sad. I liked coding the same way I like writing natural language. Finding an elegant phrase to express something in either discipline leaves me deeply satisfied. Some code, like some words, has an inherent beauty. However, hand coding will soon become a skill only practiced for fun and historical reference. There are more implications than asking an AI to generate the code we would have written by hand otherwise. For example, modern programming languages are designed to minimize keystrokes and avoid code duplication – most developers hate keystrokes. An AI does not care if it has to crank out one or 1,000 lines of code. How will that change software architecture? Do we still need highly customizable generic frameworks? Or will it be more efficient to generate optimized proprietary code? Will new programming languages specifically cater to the AI-powered development cycle?