As Danielle adjusted to the rhythm of modern motherhood, her profession underwent a drastic change.
Danielle, who asked that her first name be used to avoid harming her career prospects, worked as a programmer for an auto company in Portland, Oregon. Before she left her job in mid-2024, almost no one was using AI to write code; by the time she was ready to return a year later, it had become an expectation. Once upon a time, she was drawn to coding for the sake of job security, but artificial intelligence threatened to upend that. “The skills I learned – rote programming skills – we now have to outsource to artificial intelligence,” says Danielle.
The world’s largest artificial intelligence companies predict a future where almost everything will be “vibration encoded.” In April, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI would write most of the Meta code over the next 18 months. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told WIRED that he expects AI coding to become “one of those rare multi-trillion dollar markets.”
The dizzying pace of change has impacted software engineers across the industry. However, the effects are particularly severe for newborn mothers who were coincidentally away from their desks when the change took place.
“The job I did before is something I would like to do again. I think I was good at it,” says Danielle. “But I realize this job will never exist again.”
Directors responsible for the largest AI laboratories warned that technology has the potential to eliminate white-collar jobs, from law to finance, consulting and sales. However, few industries have been segmented in the same way as software development.
With the release of coding automation tools by Anthropic and OpenAI in May 2025, the field became less focused on composition and more focused on childcare. Learning this modern way of working isn’t too complicated, but newborn mothers are left behind by colleagues who have benefited from the advantage.
A UK project manager currently on maternity leave tells WIRED that her manager suggested she brush up on her artificial intelligence knowledge while she’s away. “It made me feel very vulnerable,” says the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from her employer, a development agency. Before she left, employees used AI on an ad hoc basis, usually for miniature tasks such as auto-complete lines of human-written code. But he says the agency wants artificial intelligence to play a bigger role.
“The likelihood of me spending my statutory maternity pay on an AI course… is slim,” she says. “It’s not something I should be spending my maternity leave doing.” But he worries that falling behind could make him a target for layoffs.
Mary McCreary, a data engineer at a US health technology company, says that after returning to work, her employer helped her acclimatize to modern artificial intelligence tools. Initially skeptical of artificial intelligence, McCreary appreciated its ability to explain the functions of code to her colleagues. “What I hate most about being an engineer is having to look at other people’s code,” he says.
Nevertheless, technology has changed the nature of work. “The disadvantage is that I don’t have time to do tedious tasks that wouldn’t require a lot of effort on my brain,” McCreary says. “I always focus on difficult problems because it relieves all the boredom.”
Another software engineer who lives in Minnesota and works at a marketing software company tells WIRED that AI coding tools have helped her keep up with her colleagues when dealing with fatigue and other postpartum symptoms. “I definitely wasn’t ready to go back,” says the engineer, who asked to remain anonymous to speak honestly about the utilize of artificial intelligence in her company. “Your body is filled with all these hormones and your brain changes to the point that all you can focus on is this baby.” The ability to offload tasks that require deep and sustained concentration – such as debugging code – to AI “has been incredibly helpful,” he says.