As Danielle settled into the rhythms of new motherhood, her profession underwent a drastic reinvention.
Danielle, who asked to use her first name to avoid damaging her job prospects, worked as a software developer at a car company in Portland, Oregon. Before she left the workforce in mid-2024, barely anybody used AI to write code; by the time she was ready to return, a year later, it had become the expectation. Once upon a time, she had been drawn to coding for the job security it offered, but AI was threatening to upend that. “The skills that I had learned—rote development skills—we are now expected to outsource to AI,” Danielle says.
The world’s largest AI companies anticipate a future where pretty much everything is “vibe-coded.” In April, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI will write most of Meta’s code within the next 18 months. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told WIRED he expects AI coding to become “one of these rare multitrillion-dollar markets.”
The dizzying pace of change has touched software engineers across the industry. But the effects are particularly acute for new mothers who, by a fluke of timing, happened to be away from their desks when the shift was taking place.
“The kind of work I was doing before, I would like to do again. I think I was good at it,” says Danielle. “But I recognize that job will never exist again.”
The executives in charge of the largest AI labs have warned that the technology could wipe out white-collar jobs, from law to finance to consulting to sales. But few industries have been carved up in the same way as software development.
With the release of coding automation tools by Anthropic and OpenAI in May 2025, the field became less about composition and more about babysitting. Learning this new way of working isn’t overly complicated, but new mothers face falling behind colleagues who have benefited from a headstart.
A UK project manager currently on maternity leave tells WIRED her manager suggested that she brush up on AI while she’s out. “It made me feel very vulnerable,” says the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by her employer, a development agency. Before she left, staff used AI on an ad hoc basis, typically for small tasks like auto-completing lines of human-written code. But the agency is eager for AI to play a larger role, she says.
“The likelihood of me spending my statutory maternity pay on an AI course … is slim to none,” she says. “This is not something I should be spending my maternity leave doing.” But she worries that falling behind might make her a target for layoffs.
Mary McCreary, a data engineer working at a US-based health tech company, says her employer helped her acclimate to new AI tools when she returned to work. Initially skeptical of AI, McCreary came to appreciate its ability to explain the function of her coworkers’ code. “The thing that I hate most about being an engineer is having to review other people’s code,” she says.
But the technology has nonetheless changed the nature of the work. “The downside is that I don’t get any time to do tedious tasks that would be not a lot of effort for my brain,” says McCreary. “I’m always looking at hard problems, because I’ve offloaded all of the tedium.”
Another software engineer, who lives in Minnesota and works at a marketing software company, tells WIRED that AI coding tools helped her to keep pace with colleagues in the face of fatigue and other postpartum symptoms. “I definitely was not ready to return,” says the engineer, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about her company’s use of AI. “Your body is filled with all these hormones and your brain changes to the point that all you can fixate on is that child.” The ability to offload tasks that require deep and sustained concentration—like debugging code—to AI “was incredibly helpful,” she says.
