New Moms Are Returning to Coding Jobs Radically Reshaped by AI
New Moms Are Returning to Coding Jobs Radically Reshaped by AI
新手妈妈重返职场：AI 彻底重塑了编程工作
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.
当丹妮尔（Danielle）逐渐适应新手妈妈的生活节奏时，她的职业生涯也经历了一场剧烈的重塑。丹妮尔（为避免影响职业前景，她要求仅使用名字）此前在俄勒冈州波特兰市的一家汽车公司担任软件开发人员。在 2024 年年中她离开职场前，几乎没人使用 AI 来编写代码；而一年后，当她准备重返岗位时，这已成为行业标配。曾经，她因编程工作带来的职业稳定性而入行，但 AI 的出现正威胁着这一切。“我过去学到的那些技能——死记硬背的开发技能——现在都被要求外包给 AI 了，”丹妮尔说。
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.”
全球最大的几家 AI 公司预见了一个几乎所有事物都通过“直觉编程”（vibe-coded）完成的未来。今年 4 月，马克·扎克伯格预测，在未来 18 个月内，Meta 的大部分代码将由 AI 编写。OpenAI 首席执行官萨姆·奥特曼最近告诉《连线》（WIRED）杂志，他预计 AI 编程将成为“罕见的数万亿美元市场之一”。
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.”
这种令人眼花缭乱的变革速度影响了整个行业的软件工程师。但对于那些因时间巧合，恰好在变革发生时离开岗位的母亲们来说，这种影响尤为剧烈。“我以前做的那种工作，我希望能再做一次。我觉得我做得很好，”丹妮尔说，“但我意识到，那种工作永远不会再存在了。”
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.
各大 AI 实验室的负责人曾警告称，这项技术可能会淘汰从法律、金融到咨询和销售等领域的白领工作。但很少有行业像软件开发这样被彻底重构。随着 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 在 2025 年 5 月发布代码自动化工具，该领域的工作重心从“创作”转向了“监管”。学习这种新的工作方式并不复杂，但新手妈妈们面临着落后于那些拥有先发优势的同事的风险。
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.
一位目前正在休产假的英国项目经理告诉《连线》，她的主管建议她在休假期间补习一下 AI 知识。“这让我感到非常脆弱，”这位女士说。由于担心遭到雇主（一家开发代理机构）的报复，她要求匿名。在她离开之前，员工只是偶尔使用 AI，通常仅限于自动补全人类编写的代码行等小任务。但她说，该机构现在急于让 AI 发挥更大的作用。
“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.
“我把法定产假工资花在 AI 课程上的可能性……几乎为零，”她说，“这不应该是我休产假时该做的事。”但她担心，落后可能会使她成为裁员的目标。
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.
在美国一家健康科技公司工作的资深数据工程师玛丽·麦克里里（Mary McCreary）表示，当她重返工作岗位时，雇主帮助她适应了新的 AI 工具。起初对 AI 持怀疑态度的麦克里里，后来开始欣赏它解释同事代码功能的能力。“作为一名工程师，我最讨厌的事情就是审查别人的代码，”她说。
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.”
但这项技术确实改变了工作的本质。“缺点是我没有时间去做那些不需要动脑的琐碎任务了，”麦克里里说，“我总是不得不面对难题，因为我已经把所有枯燥的工作都外包出去了。”
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.
另一位居住在明尼苏达州、在一家营销软件公司工作的软件工程师告诉《连线》，在面对疲劳和其他产后症状时，AI 编程工具帮助她跟上了同事的步伐。“我绝对还没准备好回归，”这位要求匿名以坦诚谈论公司 AI 使用情况的工程师说，“你的身体里充满了各种荷尔蒙，大脑的变化让你只能专注于孩子。”她说，能够将需要深度且持续专注的任务（如调试代码）外包给 AI，“非常有帮助”。
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.
2024 年 9 月她刚休完产假回来时，公司主要将 AI 工具当作代码故障排除论坛 Stack Overflow 的“高级版”来使用。但一年后，所有的代码变更都会通过 AI 模型进行错误检查。随后，AI 开始承担大部分编程工作；公司甚至开始设立排行榜，根据工程师使用 AI 的频率进行排名。“感觉我不再是一名软件工程师，更像是一个提线木偶大师，”她说。
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.
到了 2025 年 11 月，随着 Anthropic 旗舰 AI 模型的新迭代版本 Claude Opus 4.5 的发布，编程工具进一步升级。“Opus 简直太神了，”她说，“我一个人就完成了（整个开发团队）一个季度的工作量。虽然过程比较粗糙，但确实把活儿干完了。”她开始担心，自己的岗位很快就会因为自动化而消失。
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.”
与此同时，正在寻找新工作的软件工程师们发现，AI 已经重构了就业市场。在女儿出生前三个月，丹妮尔被裁员了。去年她开始申请新的软件职位时，发现大多数招聘启事都要求候选人具备一定程度的 AI 知识，但很少明确说明具体的使用要求。“这种模糊性让人非常焦虑，”她说，“我根本不知道该如何去探究自己缺失了什么技能。”
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 top of disadvantage.”
专家表示，女性在长期休产假后寻找新工作时，往往会面临雇主不愿配合照顾家庭责任、对她们工作投入度的误解以及其他结构性问题。“目前的系统将产假视为‘退出’而非‘暂停’。这是一种设计上的失败，”非营利组织“带女性重返职场”（Bring Women Back to Work）德国分部负责人丹妮拉·古利（Daniela Gulie）说。但在软件行业，AI 加剧了这些问题，在母亲们与同事之间制造了“AI 素养鸿沟”，并扭曲了劳动力市场，使她们处于不利地位。“这是女性被坑害的又一种方式，”英国智库“怀孕即被坑”（Pregnant Then Screwed）的首席执行官雷切尔·格罗科特（Rachel Grocott）说，“这简直是在劣势之上又叠加了新的劣势。”