The Automation of Coding and Why Programmers Will Never Stand Up for Themselves

GitHub is a web 2.0 case study for the ages. Founded in 2008, it was an enormous success as a software company, in its sector it quickly and easily drove out earlier competitors like Subversion (differing from Github in being both open source and community-managed, maintained by the Apache Software Foundation as opposed to… venture capitalists). Github quickly became the #1 tool outside of on-premise hosting, and later created an on-premise product allowing it to capture more of the enterprise market. Github was not only beloved by developers, but in the start of the last bubble, you’re talking around 2012, it became the aspirational height of tech culture itself. Github, which always had sickening amounts of funding compared to its technical charter, was *the* decisive “cool”: they had the hippest “beer ups” and the hippest brand and the slickest gear and the most opulent office in the most rapidly gentrifying area of San Francisco. Its employees were greeted much like rock stars as they flew around giving the most highly coveted talks at various hip, edgy software conferences. They reflected what were supposedly industry values like open source, “developers-first”, “manager-less management”, play and creativity and the entrepreneurship of software developers. In retrospect, Github was very much about what the sort of template for startups and for startup culture would be. And it all paid off: it sold for a cool 7.5 billion to Microsoft in 2018. That is a fuck-ton of money — Github at this time had just 600 employees, which works out to just a fantastic division, and while of course there are many more recipients of the wealth from the sale than those 600 employees (most of the money went to VC, of course), it does give you a sense of just how big the purchase was and the discrepancy between the price tag and their operating footprint.

Github — well, now Microsoft — Microsoft came out with a new programming AI called Co-Pilot, in summer 2021. Trained on allllll that data of allll that software and so many people’s work — there are over 73 million users of Github, according to their reports; this sounds wayyy high to me but nonetheless, that is a LOT of people. Github has had access to basically just a gigantic archive of work, the amount of code on the site is just astronomical. The AI is currently behind 35% of newly-written code - which is an absolutely staggering amount. Internal results indicate that developer productivity could be increased by 55%, and Github is slated to come out with an enterprise version of the product, while making it a #1 focus of the company. 

None of those products were voted on by the programming community, by a single one of those users, whose work was used to create this. 

Because very obviously what we see here is people’s own work being used to automate their own jobs. A level of automation that fundamentally reshapes what the job entails and what is needed for it. Automation has been closing in on tech worker’s counterparts in other areas of the business. Especially as those other employees have started unionizing, Amazon itself has really ramped up its robotics investments, and it’s very clear they are aggressively moving towards replacing as much of the human labor in its supply chain as possible. In fact, Amazon workers have already long been surveilled by automated technologies and have pushed against robotic supervision, as Amazon goes hard for delivery drones and various other automations to the supply chain. The problems with unionization that are unfolding are numerous, but perhaps the most existential of them is that these jobs have been marked for deletion a long time ago. 

 Even with the launch of this AI, the developer uproar has been absolutely minimal, and the vast majority of the industry has begun using it and integrating it into the workflow, which will give Github yet MORE data to use to make an even better AI that will replace them even faster. The greatest dialogue has been about “the implications for licensing” and so on, and some big industry players are going to quibble in court over the details, but that will soon pass, and other companies like Amazon have already made significant progress towards their own competitor. Programmers will do absolutely nothing, but trust me, you will hear them crying when the jobs start drying!! 

As I’ve written about before, what distinguishes the tech worker class is that they CHOOSE to define themselves by being better than other classes of workers. They have literally never meaningfully stood in solidarity with any other workers, in particular as they were actually actively harming other workers through things like city invasion, gentrification, real estate speculation, and more than anything, themselves having jobs which are automating away other people. It is tech workers who are creating the software, hardware and production of automation that is tearing through all other workforces; they are the material source of it. But they never expected it could be them!! 

There was a bit of a tizzy when the coding AI came out, as well as when Amazon’s analog was announced as well. But even early queries around data rights weren’t sustained and certainly didn’t lead to any type of meaningful introspection. Tech workers are both completely in denial and totally brainwashed about their relationship with the power structure and the elite in tech. They have trouble assimilating any information that contradicts their visions of themselves as being in a class with tech elite, NOT in a class with the people “beneath” them. 

Software engineers seem to have felt for a long time, out of self-importance and vanity, that you cannot automate software engineering; software engineering is what AUTOMATES, not what is AUTOMATED. This is the relationship that software engineers have had with other workers: that of specifically creating the things that were used to oppress other workers. Software engineers create the automation for other worker’s jobs, even designing the surveillance and monitoring systems that would be used to crushed their unions. 

But too bad for these folks, evidence suggests that at least large parts of software engineering ARE extraordinarily vulnerable to automation. The mainstream doesn’t really understand that coding is very simply instructions given to a computer in text. These same instructions are typed over and over, over and over, by millions and millions of engineers, all of the time, in a period where other text-based AIs are literally writing college papers. So this thing has just a really high potential of very quickly, having a huge impact on large numbers of tech workers. 

Of course, when you look at the model for how CoPilot was developed, it will sound familiar, because this is just the same old playbook: tech collects a bunch of information from large numbers of people, forms large monopolies over data sets, sells access back to its users, and then uses the information to sell it to advertisers, build new products with, turn into mind-control weapons for Meta, etc. and generally harm and oppress the very people it harvested data from. They have now done that exact same thing with their supposed precious engineers: they surveilled and captured their work and output, and with all these different VC-controlled software tools, collected huge stores of data, and analyzed that data extensively, and produced something with massive negative implications for millions of people’s jobs — the very people it built itself on. Developers were automating themselves at the same time they were automating everyone else. 

Github did not get bought because of its talent or its revenue or its popularity. It got bought because it had CORE DATA on the very heart of the field itself and the workers in it. They had unprecedented access to insight and metrics ABOUT software developers and how they work. The AI is working off of this data set, which is a really significant canon of every contribution to every open source project and just any code of any kind, including personal projects and proprietary code bases, that was using Github since fucking 2008. This is more than just about an AI having the capability to look at computer instructions and “learn” them, but to actually have a full representation of how much of the software ecosystem has developed overall, over the past 14 years. 

If coding AI is already producing 35% of new code, and at voice command, at this point already? And that we are SO early in the lifecycle? The implications are staggering.  

One of the more interesting facets of the case is it demonstrates the extent to which computer programmers are fucking brainwashed. There was never critical talk, except in *my* work and magazine, about if putting all of our code into the hands of one company backed by our most ruthless VCs, was a good idea. By the time Github was growing at an incredible rate, it was clear that any potential for open source to serve as any kind of counter to the dominant technology business model or values, didn’t even exist and had never existed. Github had HUGE venture capital backing, so everyone knew damn well that the company would most likely sell to a giant company at a totally insane price, which it did. 

The sale to Microsoft was celebrated. There was no outrage that these criminals had just literally sold the TRUE trade secrets — which is the contributions of workers, how they work, how projects work, how connections between coders and projects work, how they write code, and what they produce —  into a gigantic tech company that had actually bastardized and worked to destroy at least the purported values and goals of open source for decades. 

Even as the AI has been rolled out, concern is absolutely minimal about the future impact this could have on THEIR OWN JOBS: one multi-billion dollar company being acquired by one of the richest corporations on the planet, which just happens to love smashing the shit out of workers and already benefits enormously from worker exploitation and automation. Regardless of how safe computer programmers think they are, they are simultaneously the greatest expense and liability of the tech elite, and software engineers have not magically transcended the effects of ruthless venture capitalism — it will wipe them out too. Yet, the entire technical field expresses zero self awareness that they, too, might be the targets of their bosses.

 Github, and what will happen flowing from it, has happened to many workers downstream of them: massive devaluation of workers, potentially abrupt core changes to what counts as a competitive skillset, job loss/loss of job stability, significantly lower salaries, more grueling and punishing conditions, pull back of benefits and productions. 

Github said: “developers are king”, and developers truly thought to themselves “I am not a worker, I am a King”.

This whole time, and even *now*, even *after* a very small set of developers working *for* the company got rich as hell off of the labor of a far vaster majority, that had actually been paying Github this whole time to eventually automate them away — even now, tech workers’ embrace of the venture capital and startup model is fundamental to how they see themselves. They were MORE THAN HAPPY to turn this giant body of data for stewardship over to the control of a very small group of people with no regards to ethics or for workers whatsoever. In fact, we held up Github as some kind of cultural touchtone for the hacker ethos — Github employees were beloved, they were made into celebrities, Github profiles became “the new LinkedIn”, variant quips to the effect of “have a problem? Make a pull request” proliferating, posting contribution graphs on Twitter, fuck your unhealthy af six month streak, etc. 

Github was, more than anything, “cool”, and that was more important than anything else. 

Github is curious because its a case of labor cannibalizing itself because it thought it was too good to be labor. One thing we have learned from all of the technology triumphs and failures of the last few bubbles, is that when we hand over our data to venture capitalists, we give them every power in the world over us; they inevitable use it to crush us. Time is running out for software engineers, too, as recent mass layoffs demonstrate that tech companies actually don’t give a fuck about computer programmers either. Even when told in VERY direct terms that they were out on their asses, tech workers seemingly couldn’t find a group identity, politic or shared goal that would make it possible to push back. The 50% of employees at Twitter who weren’t laid off/fired, are just clinging along as much as they can, no matter what tech elite does to their teammates, friends, their users, and their very own CODE AND PRODUCT, that working DEVELOPERS built — not Jack before Elon, and not Elon. Developers. Notice something in common with Github here: you have users producing huge amounts of data, you have developers building products that make that data useful, and none of it made by venture capitalists whatsoever, yet they are the ones with the money and power over it all.

Will tech workers wake up and realize that they are no better than other workers, share common goals, experience shared problems with management, and are facing the same existential threats as all other workers in America: wildly accelerating automation, increasing concentration of power in tech billionaire hands, lack of pay stability and job security, busting of worker organizing, massive over work, even workplace injuries like RSI, chronic back pain and clinical, diagnosed mental health problems? 

They won’t. Because tech has very much turned software engineers into an oppressive class towards other workers. Even when the jobs of tech workers are threatened, they are still in a position of power over other workers. They are the ones with the most highly paid positions, they are the ones who live in gentrified housing in invaded cities, they are ones who can exploit lower-income workers, including those contracted to their own companies, and they are the ones, who have been building for their bosses, the things that are ruining everyone else’s lives: mass surveillance, robots, algorithms, social platforms… tech workers even build actual weapons that are used both here and abroad against some of the most marginalized peoples and groups in the world.

Tech elite will continue to artificially maintain that delta between tech workers and other types of workers, with the minimum it can slide by, because what *it* uses to control its technology workers AND other workers is this dynamic between them. The tool from which they derive their control over software engineers isn’t purely about money; its that tech companies give tech workers the ability to oppress others categorically. Addicted to that, reliant on that, extracting an identity from that, lulled by that, energized by that, *focused and obsessed by that*, their bosses have significantly upped the degree of anti-worker action against them. To no comment. 

There is no reason to feel sorry for these people. They chose this. Every single time, they choose this. They have chosen it *to their own detriment* as long it enables them to crush other workers on behalf of their bosses.  

Automate away!!!