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As Danielle settled into the new rhythms of motherhood, her career underwent a radical revamp.
Danielle, who asked that her first name be used to avoid hurting her job prospects, worked as a software developer at an automotive company in Portland, Oregon. Before it left the workforce in mid-2024, barely anyone used AI to write code; By the time she was ready to return, a year later, that had become the expectation. Once upon a time, she was drawn to programming because of the job security it offered, but artificial intelligence was threatening to turn that upside down. “The skills I learned — rote development skills — are now expected to be outsourced to AI,” says Danielle.
The world’s largest AI companies anticipate a future where almost everything isEnergeticIn April, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that artificial intelligence would write Most of the code is meta During the next 18 months. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently He told WIRED He expects AI coding to become “one of those rare multi-trillion-dollar markets.”
The astonishing pace of change has occurred Software engineers touched Across industry. But the effects are particularly acute for new mothers who, by coincidence, were away from their desks when the transition occurred.
“The kind of work I was doing before, I would like to do again,” says Danielle. “I think I was good at it.” “But I realize that this job will never exist again.”
The executives in charge of the largest AI labs have done so to caution Technology can eliminate white-collar jobs, from law to finance to consulting to sales. But few industries have done so It was carved In the same way as software development.
With the release Coding automation tools By Anthropic and OpenAI in May 2025 The field is becoming less interested in composition and more interested in babysitting. Learning this new way of working is not very complicated, but new mothers face falling behind their colleagues who have benefited from the beginning.
A project manager in the United Kingdom who is currently on maternity leave told WIRED that her manager suggested she improve AI while she was abroad. “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 small tasks such as automatically completing lines of human-written code. But she says the agency is keen for AI to play a bigger role.
“The likelihood of spending my statutory maternity pay on an AI course…is very slim,” she says. “This is not something I should be spending maternity leave on.” But she fears that falling behind could make her a target for layoffs.
Mary McCreary, a data engineer working at a US-based health technology company, says her employer helped her adapt to new AI tools when she returned to work. Initially skeptical of artificial intelligence, McCreary recognized its ability to explain the function of her co-workers’ code. “What I hate most about being an engineer is having to review other people’s code,” she says.
But technology has changed the nature of work. “The downside is that I don’t get any time to do strenuous tasks that don’t require a lot of effort for my brain,” McCreary says. “I’m always looking for difficult problems, because I’ve gotten rid of all the boredom.”
Another software engineer, who lives in Minnesota and works at a marketing software company, tells WIRED that AI programming tools have helped her keep up with her colleagues in the face of fatigue and other postpartum symptoms. “I was definitely not ready to go back,” says the engineer, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about her company’s use of artificial intelligence. “Your body is full of all these hormones and your brain is changing to the point where all you can focus on is that baby.” The ability to offload tasks that require deep, sustained focus — such as debugging code — to the AI “has been incredibly helpful,” she says.
