There is a group chat many Singapore parents would recognise.

Someone shares a news article about AI job displacements. A few people react.

Then someone says: “Aiya, but Singapore different lah. Our kids will be fine.“

And usually, that’s where the conversation ends.

This article tries to go a step further – not because there are easy answers, but because the question itself may no longer be sufficient. And for the next generation, there may not be much time left to keep asking it the same way.

The question isn’t: will AI replace jobs?

It already is.

The more urgent question is: what will actually be left, and does the current educational and career pathway still lead somewhere stable?

Earlier this year, Meta announced it was cutting 8,000 jobs, not because the company was failing. Meta is projecting $53 to $56 billion in revenue for the quarter.

Microsoft offered buyouts to nearly 9,000 workers while simultaneously spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure.

Oracle quietly reduced its engineering workforce. Atlassian cut a tenth of its staff after growing cloud revenue 26 percent year on year.

Let that sit for a moment.

Profitable companies. Fewer people. More AI.

These aren’t weak roles being trimmed. They aren’t redundant positions or low performers.

In the first quarter of 2026 alone, close to 80,000 tech jobs disappeared. Nearly half were attributed directly to AI. Not economic slowdown. Not bad strategy. AI doing the work instead.

The tuition centre is still full. DSA prep is still happening. Parents are still steering their children toward the same outcomes their own parents wanted for them. But underneath all of it, there is an enormous shift that almost nobody names out loud.

Is Coding Still Worth It?

A mother raised this question a few months ago. Her son is twelve, does well in school, and loves Minecraft. She wanted to know if coding was still relevant, or whether AI had made it pointless.

What she was really asking was not about Python or JavaScript.

She was asking whether the plan still works. Top student. Good university. Stable tech job.

That plan held for twenty years. And now she was watching people with good degrees and stable tech roles get told the company was running leaner.

Here is what the technology industry has already quietly moved on from: the idea that writing code is, by itself, a career.

Large technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, and others have all confirmed that AI systems now writes a significant portion of production code.

Tools now exist that let professionals build working applications by describing what they want in plain English, rather than writing thousands of lines of commands from memory.

The technical bottleneck is no longer syntax. It is systems thinking – understanding how to architect a solution, break down a problem, communicate intent precisely.

Entry-level coding jobs are shrinking as a direct result.

Coding alone, as the goal and the endpoint, probably isn’t sufficient anymore.

But the thinking that coding teaches, the logic, the sequencing, the tolerance for ambiguity, that’s not going anywhere.

What’s changing is what you need to build on top of it.

The honest answer: coding was never really the point. The capacity to think, to make, to adapt – that was always the point. We just used to teach it through code alone.

Two Kinds of People

And that arithmetic is going to keep running.

So the question for parents isn’t whether AI will affect their children’s careers. It will. The question is which side of the divide their children will land on.

There are going to be two kinds of people in this workforce.

● People who work alongside AI and get more done because of it.
● People who do the work that AI used to need humans for.

The gap between those two groups won’t be about who’s smarter.

That distinction, director of AI versus person replaced by it, is becoming one of the defining divides of the next decade.

That distinction, director of AI versus person replaced by it, is going to matter enormously in about ten years. Most kids don’t understand it yet. Honestly, most adults don’t either.

There Is Still Time – If We Start Now

The twelve-year-old who loves Minecraft has ten or eleven years before he enters the workforce.

That is enough time. If we start now.

What that actually looks like is not replacing one set of lessons with another.

It’s about building children who know how to think with AI as a creative and technical partner, who understand how to direct it, judge whether what it produces is any good, ask it better questions, and build things with it that didn’t exist before.

That’s different from using AI as a shortcut. It’s a form of fluency, one the World Economic Forum has consistently flagged as among the most critical skills for the decade ahead.

That mother’s question stays with us: Is coding still worth it?

She was asking the right thing, just slightly too narrowly.

Whether working hard, doing the right subjects, getting the right grades, following the path, whether any of that still leads where it used to.

The answer is not no.

The answer is: it depends on whether we update the map.

The companies are not waiting.

They are making the calculation every quarter, in real time, and the results are showing up in job cut announcements from otherwise healthy balance sheets.

The only question left is whether the rest of us recognise it early enough to matter, before our children are the ones the calculation is made about.

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