I don't feel the need to justify my salary, since I'm simply lucky in that regard. But I'm pretty sure you couldn't do my job just because you had access to a coding agent. Most of my time at the office is spent discussing high-level architecture and strategy, ideas, customer requests, backward compatibility, safety, security, quality assurance, etc.

Writing the actual code is a significant part of that, but the codebase is so complex that even Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 struggle with it without being fed a *lot* of context and constraints. And even then, they need a *lot* of steering due to making bad decisions that only someone with an intimate knowledge of the theory behind our software is able to catch.

I can only assume that people who think coding agents can completely replace an actual developer mostly deal with trivial software regarding both scope and the type of customers they serve (individuals instead of big companies in industry).

How do you justify your salary given that you're just using OSS compiler/editor any of us could use for free in your role ?

AI just changed how I edit code - I still see coworkers (senior developers) failing with Claude/Codex and get stuck when there are trivial solutions if you understand the full problem space. Right now AI is just a productivity tool.

Please see Ben Evans’ podcast on a good take on this. Coding is just one of the task you do in your job, it is not the job or at least it probably is not. You do not get paid to code, you get paid to make a set of decisions that create value to the company. If this is automated then yes sadly your salary is not justified.

Someone competent using them is today a requirement and for awhile will make the marginal utility of skilled workers greater than that of unskilled. The justification is that they are much more productive than they were before.

You can build things quickly with AI, but you can’t delegate your responsibilities to AI. Once the AI starts struggling, you’ll need to takeover and figure it out.

They're using a tool that anyone can use for $20 an hour, sure. But that's not what they're "just" doing. This is what is so insane about non-technical people talking about code - writing the actual syntax is not really the hard part.

What you're saying is like "how do you justify your salary as a NASA engineer when anyone can use Simulink and generate the code?"

It is extremely ignorant.

How do you justify your salary given that you sit in a chair all day, likely making the world worse, and make 5x as much as someone saving lives, building houses, or teaching kids how to read?

I don't think you understand how programming as a job works, writing code is the final output of the process but it's not the job in itself.

There is no good justification for anyone's salary really, except perhaps doctors and underwater welders.

no engineers on staff and stakeholders think the company is incompetent

Coinbase is paying the price for that for every UX glitch, after the CEO was gleeful about HR personnel shipping production code

They don't need to justify it!

Because the tool will happily give you a "solution" that kinda works for a few inputs. It will happily correct itself when you give it more incorrect tests.

It will almost never converge on the general solution that will pass tests you haven't given it yet.

This is why AI is sooo good at Javascript and related slop. A solution that "kinda works" is good enough 9 times out of 10 and if some tests fail well ... YOLO and the web page will probably render anyway.

Contrast that to using Scheme or Lisp where AI will have trouble simply keeping the parentheses balanced.