Developers, the First Copyist Monks

Before the printing press, copying a book was a trade. In the silence of monasteries, copyist monks spent their lives reproducing texts by hand, letter after letter, one page a day on a good day. It was a rare craft, respected, and well paid for its time. Then Gutenberg set up his press, around 1450, and within a generation the trade was gone.

But look closely at what happened. The copyist wasn’t erased from the world. He moved. Those who understood printing became printers, publishers, proofreaders. Those who clung to their quills became relics. The knowledge didn’t disappear, the gesture changed.

Today, the first scriptorium to receive its press is software development.

The code printing press is already here

Anthropic’s boss announced it point-blank: AI will soon write the vast majority of code. And indeed, AI agents no longer settle for completing a line. They open a project, write an entire feature, test it, fix it, and ship it. The hand that held the quill now holds something else.

And it’s already no longer a prediction. In May 2026, before the French National Assembly’s commission of inquiry, Mistral’s boss, Arthur Mensch, said something dizzying: at his company, engineers no longer write lines of code. The developer is no longer the craftsman who writes, he has become a manager directing agents. Remember the date, because it matters in a field where everything moves fast: this tipping point isn’t announced for tomorrow, it’s already behind us. We’ll come back to that hearing, it says far more still, but for now let’s hold onto that one sentence.

Everywhere, the same funereal conclusion is being drawn: the developer’s trade is doomed. And everywhere, it’s wrong, exactly as wrong as announcing the end of the written word in 1450.

Developers are, for now, the big winners

It’s the paradox few dare to state. Developers are the first ones hit, and at the same time the first winners. For a very simple economic reason: theirs is the only trade whose productivity gain translates immediately into money.

Senior coder Simon, in a recent video, says it with the same image I use here, Gutenberg’s. His thesis matches mine: mastering AI in 2026 is the most powerful lever to accelerate a developer’s career, not to doom it. The trade isn’t dying, it’s moving up a notch. From writing to supervising, from execution to intent. The copyist becomes a printer. It’s exactly what Mensch describes when he says his engineers have become managers of agents: not the end of the trade, its shift upward.

But that climb is anything but automatic, and this is where I want to be honest with you.

The flip side, told by those who got burned

A senior developer publicly told the story of his disenchantment, after one hundred and fifty thousand lines of AI-generated code, with the tools from before the late-2025 shift, the one brought by Gemini 3, Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5. At first, the euphoria: he was shipping in a week what a team produced in a month. Then the wall. On a real production feature, the AI started looping, modifying seven files at random, stacking up bugs. His conclusion: the tool doesn’t truly reason, and you have to reread every line before accepting it.

Since then, the models have crossed a threshold, and some of those limits have receded. But don’t take away the wrong lesson. What remained true yesterday remains true today: the tool amplifies, it doesn’t decide. The more powerful it gets, the more the question shifts toward whoever is steering it.

The two accounts don’t contradict each other. They describe the two possible fates of the same trade. The one who learns to run the press prints thousands of pages. The one who believes the press thinks in his place produces thousands of wrong pages.

Why this chapter concerns you, even if you don’t code

You may be telling yourself this is all a matter for IT people. That’s a mistake, and it’s the whole point of the chapters that follow.

If developers are hit first, it’s not because they’re the most fragile. It’s because they’re the best positioned: their work is the easiest to convert into machine output, and the easiest to measure in value. They are the special case that announces a general law. Because what’s happening with code, the transformation of human work into something the machine produces for a few euros of compute, won’t stop at code.

And above all, don’t go looking for a training course

Here’s the real question. How did the developers who are making it become good at this game? Not by signing up for a training course. By getting their hands dirty.

And this is where I want to warn you, HR people, because this wave will reach your professions, and I already know your first reflex. When you see things moving, you look for a training course. It’s the reflex of an entire professional life. This time, it won’t be enough.

Do the math. By the time a training body designs a program, gets it approved, and trainers themselves become good enough to teach it, the content is already outdated a thousand times over. The subject moves faster than any curriculum can be written. You’d be learning last year’s state of the art, presented as a novelty.

I know because I’m living it. In six weeks, I’ve run nine projects in parallel. A site that scrapes data in real time from multiple sources to keep my community informed. The complete redesign of three sites — my business, my training program, a tool I co-run. Setting up an ERP to handle all the admin and sales for my sites. The full overhaul of an e-commerce site, in progress. A finished site for a friend’s business. A complete ecosystem to manage meals and groceries at home. And this guide. Not to mention tools for recruiters and HR, also in the works. I’m not asking you to take my word for it, go browse my sites and judge the result.

And what I do on the latest one has nothing in common with the first, even though six weeks have gone by, not six years. I learned by doing: by understanding how a tool’s capabilities work, by testing relentlessly, by pitting AIs against one another to see which understands best. If I had to freeze all of that into a training course today, it would be impossible. It would expire before it was finished.

What works is the opposite of a training course. Carve out time. Take on a real project head-on. Identify a concrete problem and try to solve it. In a safe sandbox, so nothing vital breaks, but try for real. Accept that it doesn’t work now, dig into why, and watch it work five minutes later. It’s all about iteration. You don’t receive the recipe, you find it.

I can coach, mentor, push someone who’s already elbow-deep in the grease, tell them have you seen this, have you tried that. But explaining from scratch everything that’s doable to people demanding a final recipe without ever wanting to iterate — that, nobody can do. Because it doesn’t exist.

That’s exactly what we’ll see further on. The next scriptorium to receive its press, after the developers, may well be yours. And the day it does, don’t go looking for a training course. Get your hands dirty.