It’s not a sentiment that will come naturally to many given the often eye-watering salaries of those in question, but 2026 is looking like the year we will need to develop sympathy for the coders and quants. Anyone who has used the latest iterations of agentic AI coding tools will have seen for themselves that over the past few weeks we have unquestionably crossed a threshold: the ability to write code to build real, functioning software or quickly gather and analyse data to answer questions has switched overnight from a scarce and specialist talent to a routine and ubiquitous skill. Developers and data scientists are today’s blacksmiths, with obsolescence looming large.
鉴于相关人群往往拿着令人咋舌的高薪，许多人恐怕很难自然地产生这种情绪，但2026年看起来将成为我们不得不对程序员和量化分析师产生同情的一年。任何使用过最新一代“代理式”(agentic)AI编码工具的人都会亲眼看到：在过去几周里，我们无疑跨过了一道门槛——编写代码来构建真实可用的软件，或迅速收集并分析数据以回答问题的能力，已经一夜之间从稀缺、专业的技能变成了常规、无处不在的能力。开发者和数据科学家成了今天的铁匠，淘汰的阴影近在眼前。