We didn't lose code. We lost the room.

Scary, isn't it? For us software engineers this is definitely new. But what does it actually mean?

Yesterday I tried to explain to my girlfriend how AI is changing my job. I struggled, because this change has so many layers that it is really hard to see how they are impacting our lives.

Let me start from where I come from. I'm Italian, and I moved to London in September 2015. Like most of us, looking for an opportunity that we definitely didn't have in our own country. I tried hard in Italy. I was working as a freelancer making Android and web apps in a co-working space I co-founded with three friends. Let's Make was a non-profit association where anything you wanted to build, you could. We taught courses in coding and electronics and ran events for makers. 3D printers were sort of new back then and really not great at printing. They needed a lot of love. That adventure lasted three years. We even built a few projects we unfortunately could not find investment for, but something cool to teach coding to kids was born out of it: Cubecode.

It was awesome, but I was not happy. Financially it was a real struggle in Italy. Companies in 2013 were asking for a Facebook-like app and expecting to pay 600 euros. As a solo dev doing backend, frontend and UI, that was quite a punch in the teeth.

So I left. Angry at my country. At the people who could not put in the effort to make it work. Our place was called Let's Make, Daje in Roman dialect, exactly to push people to change things and to make things. I guess my fuel ran out, so I decided to leave. It was tough, but it was the right decision. I was burnt out.

I left with the safety of a job. Without much in savings I could not afford to just go to London, so I found a job from Italy, signed the contract, and left.

Android Developer at Mimecast was my first job in the UK. I was an Android Developer! I knew the technical words, but my conversational English was bad. I started on £55K a year. In Italy I had been earning maybe 400 euros a month, working like a maniac day and night. Money doesn't make you happy, but going from struggling to reach the end of the month to being able to buy your first camera, an Olympus Pen-F, was exciting.

From there the rest of the story is probably common to any other Android or iOS dev in London. It felt like there were only two places where apps were made: San Francisco and London. Going to dev beers and meeting other mobile developers made you feel like you were at the centre of the world. People from the big tech companies, people you admired, people you had seen in blog posts and tech keynotes, all in the same room as you. Londroids, Android Dev Summit, meetups, so much social networking. Which for nerds was weird, but very cool.

When people started this job, we didn't start for the money. Definitely not to change the world or to have a cool lifestyle. We did it because we loved building things. Solving puzzles. Problem solving as an engineer has to be in you. You are a builder in life. I'm sure most of us also like building things at home. Most of us have a partner who looks at us surprised that we built something instead of buying it. That is exciting for us. That excitement left Italy with me. It didn't stay behind.

When I started working as an Android dev I kept building things. I always had my own projects. I spent nights awake, frustrated that I couldn't work out how to fix something and make it work. That frustration often came to bed with me. It made me sleep badly, so many times. And then all of a sudden, the light bulb in the morning. Happiness was back. The child in me who loved playing with Lego was smiling again.

So what happened to that child? Going back to explaining to my girlfriend how we ended up in this crisis, I can say this. There was a time when big tech was a place you aspired to work. I could spend a long time on the ethical reasons why that has changed, but let's not do that on this occasion. What I can say is that these companies were top of the charts for company culture and ways of working. The Spotify model, the amazing perks in the offices, all of it. There was a period when I had recruiters from every company calling me. Back in 2019, Facebook, Google, Spotify and probably another thirty smaller companies offered me a six figure salary and a great position in the same week. Or at least the chance to go through their hiring process. We as developers got used to that. That unconditional love from tech companies was something that made us feel safe. No matter the technological changes, learning a new language from Java to Kotlin, new architectures and new ways of doing things, even layoffs. We had so many doors open. You could walk away from a company that was good for you to look for something that gave you more. Good was not enough. We needed more. We could have more.

Now all of that is gone. For the first time, software engineering itself is threatened by AI. People have stopped calling themselves software engineers. Because AI is writing the code, so who are you? Orchestrator? Builder? I hope someone finds a nice name.

Everyone keeps talking about how good AI is at coding. How AI is replacing jobs. Vibe coding is now the way of saying that "you" built something just by prompting in English. This is influencing companies. It gives a false sense of productivity, and of how replaceable highly specialised people are. Product managers now go to a junior developer and ask for a complex feature. If you are junior you probably don't know how to design a system, so AI will do it for you. Is that wrong? It's a tough question. If the aim is just getting the feature into the app, then yes, you can already do that with AI alone. I'm not going to sit here saying my thirteen years of Android development can't be replaced.

But what is happening is something more. People are not having fun anymore. People don't go to the whiteboard to draw a solution together. That brought people into the same room, with a pizza and a Coke, for hours, trying to design something. Nerds would feel part of something. People who spend a lot of time coding in isolation had that chance to get back into the real world and feel part of something. And now that the coding is not there anymore, what is left? Often we speak with AI agents. We ask for the best solution there. Often we just review code, quickly, without soul. Because when productivity goes up that high, the passion for quality goes down. When that happens your job stops being fun. Uncertainty about where to go next makes your life hard. People have real anxiety. Developers with kids, families, mortgages, find themselves with a choice nobody asked them to make: add some AI skills to your profile or get left behind. And even then, nobody knows exactly what will give us certainty, or for how long.

Nobody talks about how people are impacted by this. We tell each other we are problem solvers, so we will be fine. Maybe that's true. But problem solving was never the only thing we had.

Here is what I think we actually lost. Not the code. The room.

The whiteboard with four people arguing about a solution. The pizza and the Coke at 7pm. The meetup where you met someone who had solved the same problem last year. Londroids. Dev beers. Let's Make, in Rome, where I spent three years in a space we built so people could come and make things together.

The code was never the point. The code was the excuse to be in a room with other people who liked building things.

And that room is not gone because of AI. It is gone because we stopped going. We ask the agent instead of asking the person at the next desk. It is faster. It is also lonely.

So that is the part I would rebuild first, because it is the part that is actually in our hands. Ask a colleague to look at a design with you, on a whiteboard, with no laptop. Go to a meetup. Start one. Build something small that nobody asked for, and show it to someone.

The child in me who loved Lego is still there. But he never played alone.

Daje.