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.
When she initially returned from maternity leave, in September 2024, her company was mostly using AI tools as a sort of glorified version of the code troubleshooting forum Stack Overflow. But a year later, all code changes were being fed through AI models to check for errors. Then AI began to take up the bulk of the coding work; the company started to keep a leaderboard that ranked engineers by how much they used it. “It’s like, instead of being a software engineer, I’m more like a puppet master,” she says.
By November 2025—with the release of Claude Opus 4.5, a recent iteration of Anthropic’s flagship AI model—coding tools had advanced even further. “Opus was, like, holy shit,” she says. “I did a quarter’s worth of work [for a team of developers] just by myself. It was quick and dirty, but it got the job done.” She began to worry that her role could soon be automated out of existence.
Software engineers looking for a new job, meanwhile, are finding that AI has reconfigured the job market.
Three months before she gave birth to her daughter, Danielle was laid off. When she began to apply for new software roles last year, she found that most postings required candidates to have some degree of AI knowledge, but rarely specified how they would be expected to use it. “The ambiguity was nerve-wracking,” she says. “I didn’t know how to investigate what skill I was missing.”
Women looking for a new job after an extended maternity can come up against an unwillingness among employers to accommodate caring responsibilities, misconceptions about their commitment to their jobs, and other structural issues, experts say. “The system treats it as an exit, not a pause. It’s a design failure,” says Daniela Gulie, who leads the German arm of the nonprofit Bring Women Back to Work. But in software, AI has compounded those problems, creating an AI-literacy gap between mothers and their colleagues, and warping the labor market to their detriment. “It’s yet another way in which women are being screwed over,” says Rachel Grocott, CEO at UK-based think tank Pregnant Then Screwed. “You’re layering disadvantage on inequality.”
Danielle hasn’t come close to finding a new job; only one of the 40 applications she sent out progressed to an interview. Others shared similar impressions of a cutthroat job market, in which a glut of overqualified candidates are competing for junior and mid-level software engineering jobs. “There’s this huge, huge pool of incredibly smart and talented people that you don’t want to be a part of,” says the Minnesota engineer.
To try to bring herself up to speed, Danielle plans to start coding up small hobby projects alongside AI. But the rate of change has left her wondering whether it’s worth investing in learning the technology. “Every day, I am getting even further removed,” she says. “It’s really a terrifying moment to feel like I don’t understand the future of this industry.”
The perceived risk of being left behind during a maternity absence, or being displaced by AI, is also coloring career and family planning decisions.
The Minnesota engineer says she is torn between a desire to fight to keep her hard-won career and the pull of motherhood. “I’m trying to figure out, do I want to be a mother to a second child?” she says. “I want to be a present parent and actually be there for my child. But I’m scared to have one. It’s very complicated.”
Initially attracted to the software industry for its job security, some women are considering looking for a different career entirely—one less immediately vulnerable to automation. Danielle wonders what it might be like to spend less time behind a computer; she is considering pursuing a qualification in landscape architecture. “I don’t derive meaning from training artificial intelligence, or just fixing code generated by artificial intelligence,” she says. “If that is the future of this industry, is that a job I want?”
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