Krishna Vardhan Reddy
· Oct 6
Delivery Manager
Why AI ate code first, and what it eats next
Last decade, the forecast about automation was settled. Machines would take the routine work first: data entry, call centers, paperwork, the repetitive middle of the economy.
Creative and technical work would go last, if it went at all.
The best-known version of this forecast, the 2013 Oxford study by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, ranked jobs by how routine they were and drew the line accordingly.
Then generative AI arrived and went straight for one of the most demanding jobs in the knowledge economy: writing software.
Within three years, coding became the first knowledge profession transformed at scale.
Anthropic's Economic Index found that software development was the single largest category of how people use AI at work.
Developers now hand whole features to agents. Meanwhile the call center, the accounts payable desk and the claims office, the places everyone expected to fall first, mostly look the way they did in 2022.
Why?
The usual answer is that code is "structured" or "logical." That is not it. Legal contracts are structured. Accounting is logical. Neither went first.
The real answer is simpler, and it changes how every leader should think about where AI creates value next.
Code went first because its loop was already closed.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-ai-ate-code-first-what-eats-next-krishna-vardhan-reddy-ixgjc/
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