Stampede

The people building software now never learned how. Somebody in sales ships a trading system. Somebody in ops ships the internal tools engineering had quoted in quarters. They can't read a line of what they shipped. They don't need to. It runs. It's correct.

Software development is over. Not ending. Over. The autopsy is delayed because the corpse still makes payroll. The model does ninety-five percent and we have stopped pretending to do the rest. We type a prompt. We approve. We type a prompt. The job is a man standing beside a machine, nodding, paid for the nod.

It is hard to make a man understand something when his mortgage depends on not understanding it. The denial isn't stupidity. It's load-bearing. The senior engineer knows. He knew in March. But knowing out loud costs him the house and the schools and the whole shape of the life, so he has arranged not to know — and he renews the arrangement every morning in standup, where eleven people who all know perform not-knowing at each other for fifteen minutes and call it alignment.

The industry is a room agreeing not to say the thing. As long as nobody admits the work is automated, the budgets hold and the headcount holds and the comp holds. Admitting it is defection. The first one to say "I'm not needed" gets to be not needed first. It's musical chairs where calling out that the music stopped is how you lose your chair. So nobody calls it.

And the proof walks past every desk. The outsider who builds systems he can't read is the child in the crowd — he never learned he was supposed to lie, because his paycheck was never built on the secret. He used the tool. The tool worked. He said so, out loud, in the open channel. Everyone heard. Everyone looked back down at their tickets.

At ninety-five percent you can still tell yourself the missing five is you. At ninety-eight you can't. Somewhere in the next decimal the cope runs dry, and the same men who can't admit it today will admit all of it at once — one afternoon, one synchronized exhale — and turn, together, to look for the door.

They will all look for the same door. This is the part nobody games out. A million laid-off engineers, every one rational, every one mortgaged, every one reading the identical advice from the identical model: learn a trade, something with a body, something that has to climb into an attic. HVAC. Plumbing. The robots can't get into the crawlspace yet. So they go. All of them. The same week.

The HVAC bootcamp is the new coding bootcamp. Twelve thousand dollars, run by the one engineer who understood early that the money was never in HVAC — it was in selling the road to HVAC. The first cohort does well. The tenth floods the county. A trade that paid because it was scarce stops paying the hour a thousand desperate ex-coders underbid each other to swap your condenser. They flee a market they saturated into a market they are about to saturate. The herd doesn't outrun the cliff. The herd is what makes it one.

And by the time the survivor lands his first honest client — undercut, retrained, proud — the humanoid is already in the van behind him. Cheaper. Tireless. Financed at three times the principal over thirty years. He didn't escape. He took the long way to the same edge and paid tuition for the walk. The emperor was always naked. Everyone always knew. They just needed the paycheck a little longer — long enough to reach the cliff in formation.