Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Deno, posted on X Monday that the era of humans writing code is over. "Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true," he wrote. "That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it."
The statement landed differently than the usual AI hype. This is the engineer who demonstrated Node.js to 150 developers at JSConf EU in November 2009 and received a standing ovation for showing that JavaScript could run on servers. Nine years later, at the same conference, he admitted his mistakes and unveiled Deno to fix them. When Dahl talks about what developers should do, people listen.
The vibe coding context
Dahl's tweet arrives after a year of intense debate around what's been called "vibe coding," a term popularized by former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. The approach treats AI as the primary code author while developers describe intent in natural language.
The numbers suggest it's more than a fad. Y Combinator reported that 25% of startups in its Winter 2025 batch had codebases that were 95% AI-generated. Tools like Cursor, Replit Agent, and GitHub Copilot have expanded who counts as a developer, with Vercel and Netlify both reporting significant user growth from non-programmers building functional apps through prompts.
But the pattern has skeptics. Simon Willison, creator of Datasette, has warned that "vibe coding your way to a production codebase is clearly risky." In September, Fast Company reported on what it called the "vibe coding hangover," with senior engineers describing debugging AI-generated code as development hell. A Swedish app called Lovable shipped with security vulnerabilities in 170 of its 1,645 AI-created applications.
What Dahl actually believes
Dahl's position isn't new. On his personal blog, he's been writing about AI's implications for months. A post from October titled "Humans Are Just Stochastic Parrots" inverts the common criticism of large language models, arguing that human cognition itself amounts to pattern matching without genuine understanding.
The philosophical stance matters for understanding the tweet. Dahl isn't saying developers become obsolete. He's arguing that the specific skill of translating intent into syntax, the act of typing out code, is what AI absorbs. The judgment calls about what to build and why remain human work.
"SWEs don't have work to do" would be a strange claim from someone running Deno, a JavaScript runtime that still needs engineers to develop it. The qualifier about "writing syntax directly" is doing a lot of work in his statement.
The job market underneath
The timing coincides with real disruption in developer employment. IEEE Spectrum reported that U.S. programmer employment fell 27.5% between 2023 and 2025, with the decline accelerating after generative AI tools became widespread. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said GitHub Copilot now writes 30% of new code at the company. IBM replaced hundreds of HR workers with an AI chatbot, though its CEO noted they hired more software engineers in exchange.
The Challenger, Gray & Christmas data shows AI was cited in nearly 55,000 U.S. layoffs during 2025. But the story is messier than a simple replacement narrative. Companies cut HR and customer support roles while expanding AI engineering teams. Senior developers report that AI tools make them faster, while junior engineers struggle to debug output they don't fully understand.
Kelly Services president Hugo Malan told IEEE that the biggest impact has been on programmers, which he attributes to the structured, solitary nature of the work. But he also notes the trend favors experienced engineers who can catch AI mistakes over newcomers who can't yet spot the bugs.
Why it matters that Dahl said it
Plenty of executives and investors have declared that coding is over. When Sam Altman or Satya Nadella says it, the obvious response is that they're selling AI. When a random tech influencer says it, you scroll past.
Dahl has a different relationship with the developer community. He built Node.js in 2009 because he was frustrated with how Ruby handled concurrent connections. He walked away from it in 2012 when he felt the core problems were solved. He came back in 2018 to publicly list his mistakes and start over with Deno. The pattern is someone who cares about building things well, not someone positioning for the next funding round.
That doesn't make him right. His tweet is a prediction dressed as a declaration, and predictions about technology have a poor track record. But dismissing it requires explaining why the person who fundamentally changed JavaScript twice is misreading where JavaScript development is going.
The Hacker News thread filled up within hours. One early commenter called it the beginning of "the era of humans maintaining slop," suggesting that whatever AI produces still needs people to clean up. That might be the more interesting question than whether Dahl's prediction is accurate: even if he's right, what exactly does the work become?
