Deep Blue

Part of my Today I Learned series. Short posts on things that made me think.

Simon Willison and the Oxide and Friends podcast have coined a term for the existential dread software engineers feel watching AI eat their craft. They're calling it "Deep Blue," after the IBM machine that beat Kasparov in 1997. Not job-loss anxiety. Something more personal. The feeling that the thing you spent years getting good at stopped mattering.

The chess analogy deserves more scrutiny than it gets. Chess players went through this a generation ago and came out stronger. Chess is more popular than ever. But chess players had three decades to adjust, and chess was never about producing optimal moves. It was about the human contest. Software engineering is different. Companies hire you for the output. When a coding agent produces working, tested software in hours, the defence that "the code isn't any good" stops holding. IEEE Spectrum reports US programmer employment fell 27.5% between 2023 and 2025 (BLS data), though software developer roles held steady. The displacement is real but selective. Goldman Sachs estimates only 2.5% of US employment is at risk if today's AI use cases were expanded economy-wide. The fear is outrunning the data. But the fear itself is doing real damage.

The sharpest thing in Simon's post is the tension he refuses to resolve. The tool that threatens your identity can fulfil the mission you built that identity around. Naming the feeling won't fix it. It makes it harder to pretend it isn't there.