Once having an income of 20-35 million VND per month thanks to "walking code", Minh Tuan is now almost unable to find a new contract in the programming AI fever. - VnExpress
Source of collection: https://vnexpress.net/lap-trinh-vien-viet-giua-dong-xoay-tac-nhan-ai-5048774.html
In addition to his main job, Minh Tuan, 28 years old in Ho Chi Minh City, often takes on extra work after hours, such as designing sales websites, management applications or editing software features for small domestic and foreign businesses. Before 2025, each month he receives 2-3 projects, with income fluctuating between 20-35 million VND.
However, from the second half of 2025, the number of new contracts gradually decreased and at the beginning of this year it almost "frozen". Mr. Tuan said that the need for small businesses to create applications or websites is very large, but they do not have much money to hire professional services. Instead, they find programmers through acquaintances. Nowadays, many free AI platforms allow them to describe requirements and then create their own applications and websites without needing to understand programming.
From 2025, AI Agent programming - an agent that can perform many software development steps on its own - will explode, changing the career opportunities of many software engineers in Vietnam and around the world.
Initially only playing the role of command line suggestions, tools such as Cognition Devin, Anysphere Cursor, Anthropic Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Microsoft GitHub Copilot are moving towards the role of self-recognizing tasks, planning and completing work. Now, just describing an idea, a software or application is born with a few commands is making small programming jobs less valuable.
Duc Hoa, a 32-year-old software engineer at a technology company in Hanoi, said his "boss" requested to use AI Agent to support coding since last year. "At first everyone was excited because of the remarkable speed, but the honeymoon also passed quickly."