It’s not the tools I remember. It’s the process of solving problems and learning how to think better along the way

I read what Bill Gates recently said about artificial intelligence & programming, it made me stop and think a little. He wasn’t trying to make headlines. He was speaking from experience. Gates said that programming will still be a human profession even a hundred years from now. That sounded both realistic and refreshing in a time when so many people assume AI will take over everything.

Yes, tools are getting smarter. They’re already helping programmers with tasks like bug fixes and faster code edits. But the core of programming, the part where you have to think deeply, make decisions, and come up with something that didn’t exist before, still belongs to human (people). That’s what Gates was pointing to. Writing software involves more than technical steps. It takes awareness, judgment, and the kind of focus you can’t automate. The process of working through problems and making sense of complexity is something machines still don’t understand. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), AI could take away 85 million jobs by 2030. But it may also lead to 97 million new ones. The shift is happening, no doubt. But Bill Gates statement reminded me that there’s still space, huge space where people are needed, especially in fields that rely on reasoning and adaptability.

In my own work, I’ve seen that no tool, no matter how advanced, can replace the thinking behind the work (code). It can speed things up, but it can’t explain why a patient feels the way she/he is feeling, how a process fits into a complex real life situation, how a solution works or why it matters in the bigger picture. Hearing Gates speak with that kind of clarity made me to reflect on the future of work, and have to write this down.

It’s not the tools I remember. It’s the process of solving problems and learning how to think better along the way.

That part is still very human. And that’s what makes it meaningful.