My son will be graduating high school soon, and the pressure on him to figure out what he wants to be when he grows up is ridiculous. He’s always been great with art and technology but AI has him questioning whether those fields have a future. So he’s been considering something more traditional. A trade, maybe.

There’s a lot of chatter these days about vocations that AI can’t fully replace, and plumbing keeps coming up. I have a neighbor in the field, and recently he shared the three rules of plumbing: 1. Shit flows downhill. 2. Don’t chew your fingernails. 3. Payday is on Friday.

I laughed. But then I started thinking.

If you’ve ever connected an LLM to another system, you know there’s a surprising amount of plumbing involved. Pipes between services. Glue code holding everything together. Clogs you don’t see coming until something backs up badly. And yes, moments where you have to get your hands dirty in ways you didn’t anticipate when you took the job.

So maybe the joke’s on us. My son is eyeing traditional trades because AI is threatening us knowledge workers. Those of us in tech are quietly becoming tradespeople ourselves. We’re just doing it in config files instead of crawl spaces.

Oh, and payday is still on Friday.