As Danielle settled into the rhythms of new motherhood, her profession underwent a drastic reinvention.

Danielle, who asked to use her first name to avoid damaging her job prospects, worked as a software developer at a car company in Portland, Oregon. Before she left the workforce in mid-2024, barely anybody used AI to write code; by the time she was ready to return, a year later, it had become the expectation. Once upon a time, she had been drawn to coding for the job security it offered, but AI was threatening to upend that. “The skills that I had learned—rote development skills—we are now expected to outsource to AI,” Danielle says.

The world’s largest AI companies anticipate a future where pretty much everything is “ vibe-coded .” In April, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI will write most of Meta’s code within the next 18 months.…