The End of Programming as we Know It

The end of programming as we know it was an article written by Tim O'Reilly almost about a year ago and there were a lot of interesting ideas discussed in that and so it's always nice to kind of look back at things. I think a lot of people only look forward, but it's good to look back in time and look at how people were talking about things, you know, even just a year ago and kind of seeing where we're at today because a lot of the claims made in that article were the overall thesis was that programming has changed. The way we did programming before is different. It's over. But programming has still not gone away. It's going to just be different going forward. And I think given that a year has passed, so much more progress has been made in the last year than I would have anticipated. So I just want to say that I was definitely wrong about certain things, certain assessments that I made. Now, in fairness, nobody can precisely predict the future. If you're going to make predictions, you're going to be wrong at some point. And I am not here to like win an argument. I'm not pro AI or against AI. I just prefer to be in touch with reality. And for me, reality doesn't mean hopping on the bandwagon that everybody else is on. Because we know that about a year and a half ago when everybody was saying that cursor and a lot of these tools are making them 10x developers or 100x developers now. It was just full of BS. It was just not true. And so I pointed out, at least for me, that was just not true. That was not my reality. But right now, I think I see some people overly dismissive of AI just because we know that the boy has cried wolf over and over again. Why should you believe it now? Well, let me just say it's just my opinion, but I think in November of last year, there was definitely an inflection point. We got to a point where I realized that well, okay, even if AI doesn't get any better from here, things will never be the same again. But what does that actually mean? Because I would say right now, we're still at the point where like programming has changed, but it still hasn't gone away. And honestly, if I had to bet money, I think a year from now, we're going to be in the exact same boat. We're going to say programming has changed dramatically, maybe even more so, but still it still involves a lot of human input. understanding not just of the concepts of like how to use an agent how you know the learning curve of using something like clawed code which you know my humble opinion I'm not an expert on using them but I think you get most of the value out of using these tools pretty quickly and the rest of the value that you get like it involves knowing how to code because you kind of have to know what you can get away with when you're using the AI tools like, okay, you can implement certain things and certain things that you can't and certain things to double check and certain things that you can maybe gloss over, but that requires understanding how to code even if you don't necessarily handype your code anymore, which I guess most people aren't doing anymore. I'm certainly not handwriting very much code anymore, and I see that many experienced engineers are also doing the exact same. So when you see that online, nobody's writing code anymore, it can kind of make you think that coding, knowing how to code, knowing how to read code isn't important anymore. But I definitely do not think that's the case right now. If I just had to guess, I don't think that's going to be the case a year from now. Because when we're talking about the idea of AGI, the idea of the singularity, cure to cancer, the infinite computations, philosophically at least, like it almost feels like we're trying to get closer and closer to like God or like the God particle or like the origin of intelligence or, you know, from a math perspective, like a neutral analogy would be we're getting closer and closer to infinity. But you know that infinity is like an idea. The closer you get to it, you realize you're the same distance away from it. So I know that's kind of a strange analogy. It's not going to win an argument for me or anything, but you have to understand that what we're trying to do with this AI is exactly that. We're trying to create a general form of intelligence, whether it's coding intelligence or some other intelligence, so that it can do pretty much everything. And if it can't do everything, it's definitely going to require human input. Another, I guess, analogy you could say, if you actually take a second to think about like the current state of programming, like I said, over the last 3 months, things have drastically changed. And it's not

even clear how much things have changed until you actually continue to use and use a lot of the AI tools. Because even for me, like I had that moment in November and even in December where I realized, wow, like these tools are better than I would have expected. In the past, it was the reverse. Every time I used it, I was like, who the hell is hyping this? Because I'm trying to use it in my codebase. It ain't doing what everybody says it should be doing. But right now, it's doing more than you might expect. But at the same time, if you would have told me that this is where we would be at three years ago or even a year ago, I would have thought that it would feel different than it does, right? And if that doesn't make sense, think about this even further back. like 20 years ago if somebody told you if you're working on some company I don't know exactly what things were like 20 years ago but you know it was kind of distributed systems were getting really big right and if somebody would have told you that actually 10 years from now you know 2015 2020 we're going to have cloud providers and AWS I think they launched in 2006 or something it's not just going to give you VMs it's pretty much everything you could possibly need the concept of scaling databases and having like autoscaling and even the cost aspect of it like pay per use and all these things if somebody would have told you that this is the future this is what the world is going to look like you know I certainly would have thought that probably there's going to be a lot less programmers right like that sounds like you're taking a lot of the hard parts out of programming there's probably going to be a lot less programmers we're shipping so quickly the world is going to look something like a utopia. We're going to have, you know, so much value being created in every direction. And it's really not the case. I don't know. Is it the hydonic treadmill? Have we gotten used to it? Are we just over consuming? And you know, what is it? I don't know what exactly it is, but clearly it wasn't like that before the AI stuff happened. And so now going from, you know, late 2022 to the beginning of 2026, if somebody told you that AI is going to get this much better in such a short period of time, you would say that if coding is a solved problem, which I don't know if you could exactly make that argument, but you could make something of an argument that coding, not development, designing, and all that sort of stuff, but if you can be specific enough with your words of what you're trying to accomplish which usually it's going to take a programmer to do that then the code will write itself because that's what I mean when I say we hit an inflection point that if you have a really specific design doc for example you kind of generally say that okay the these are the design decisions I want to make this is the type of queries I want to run these are the access patterns this is the architecture this is the API interface and stuff like that you give these things to claude or some other tool I'm not promoting Claude or anything, but if you give it to Codeex even, it's pretty much just going to crank that thing out for you. Okay. So why isn't the world a utopia yet? That's what I asked myself. Where is the cure to cancer? Why can't we find it? Because like I said towards the beginning, the closer you get to infinity, it's like deceptive. You're still the same distance away from it, right? And it's like the hydonic treadmill. You'd think that at this point, humanity, we've solved, we've nearly solved life. We have abundant food. We have food, water, and shelter. But certain things just have not changed. And I know this is kind of a wacky philosophical argument. Fine. But I still think it's relevant because like I said, okay, imagine a year from now, let's say not just coding, but actually software development is a solved problem. Nobody is developing anymore. Okay, mass unemployment. But what is that world going to look like? I don't think it's going to feel that different than today. And I also don't think we're going to get to that either. I recreate intelligence. God. I think those are the two hardest problems in the universe. Understanding the origin of life and consciousness and the universe. And obviously uh everybody has their own personal beliefs about stuff like that. But I think those two questions are pretty much the same question, right? At least in my humble opinion. And so when we get to AGI and this kind of this god intelligence, the singularity and stuff, I think things just start to break down. I don't think the question even makes sense anymore. So anyways, concretely, what does this actually mean? At least my opinion. You

can take it for however you want. The short answer is I genuinely have no idea and nobody has any idea. You don't have any idea. I don't think it makes sense to even try to get overly precise with trying to predict what's going to happen in the future because you won't be able to predict it. 5 years ago, Meta thought the metaverse was going to be the big thing. It wasn't. You can never predict that. 10, 20 years ago, even if you knew social media was going to get bigger and bigger, would you have predicted that people are going to move away from text posts to image-based posts and then from that they're going to go to like stories and short form videos and stuff. You can never predict these sorts of trends. So, I know that the only question many people want answered is what the hell is going to happen? I just want to know if I should be studying this or not, or I just want to know if I should switch careers or not. And I just don't have a really good answer to that. I mean, I can tell you how I approach it and how I'm thinking about this and how I'm seeing other people that I respect and other smart people thinking about this. They and myself are not trying to predict the future. They just have a certain way that they choose to live their life and they're living it. And I'm kind of the same mindset that I have a bias where I just like to be really intense and just go really hard. And so when I was in a position where maybe some of you are in that position today when I was in 2022 when I had quit my job at Amazon and I was very low you know I was crying a lot. I didn't know what was going to happen. I felt very dumb. I didn't think I was even ever going to be able to have any sort of white collar job. You know, with the pandemic that was happening, I didn't know if a job was even going to exist. I didn't know if I was ever going to have another interview again. There was just so much uncertainty. All I really wanted was the certainty of that, okay, if I just followed this plan, everything is going to work itself out. Things are going to go great. All I really wanted was the certainty. I didn't even want the highest paying job. I would have taken any job. I just wanted some level of predictability. But when that's taken away from you and you really don't have a good way of getting it back, what do you do? How do you live life? Like, what kind of mindset do you even have that's going to get you through the day? to tomorrow and the day after that that. How do you do it? I can only speak for myself because obviously it's a personal thing, but this was my attitude. You know how a lot of people like gambling? People like uncertainty. Actually, when you open up your phone, that's the best part about it. You never know what you're going to find on social media. If you knew exactly what you were going to find, you probably wouldn't open it as frequently. People like the the, you know, scroll, the new post, new reel. What are you going to get? And sometimes it's not good. And sometimes it is good and you get that dopamine hit. Well, you can get the exact same thing from something called thinking. Okay, I'm not being condescending here, but when you think, when you try and you don't really know where you're even going, what direction you're going, but you know, you're just trying your best and you know what you're going to do. You know what the input is going to be, but you don't know what the output is going to be. The brain is like a unpredictable machine. It's not a deterministic machine. You know, you throw some voltage into that. You concentrate really hard. You start getting little thoughts, right? And let's be honest, if your brain is anything like mine, most of those thoughts are going to be pretty stupid. They're bad thoughts, but you're going to keep thinking once in a while. You're going to get some good thoughts in there. And you might even get some good thoughts that nobody else has had before. What I'm trying to say is that on some level, you can embrace the uncertainty. the mindset that I chose through all my panic and all the, you know, there was a lot going on honestly in my personal life at that point, which we won't get into. Ain't nobody got time for that. But I just said to myself, you know what? I don't really care anymore. I don't know what's going to happen. I couldn't even remember who I was at that point. Like my memory was just like Anyways, I won't get into that, but I just said to myself, you know what? whatever happens, what do I want to do? Like, h how choose to live my life? And I just said, well, at the very least, I want to try. Even if I fail, even if I starve to death, at least I'm going to do it doing my best because I just want to prove. I just want to see what I'm capable of. I want to see the heights that I can reach. And I'm not scared anymore. I'm not scared of failing because I already accepted that in this moment right now. If you're struggling or if you don't have a job or whatever your issue is, you're already in the fail mode. Let's say you've already failed. So, what are

you scared of? It might seem like I'm trying to hype you up to say, "Well, screw it. Just be the best programmer that you can be. " I'm not necessarily trying to tell anybody how to live their life. Everyone has their own circumstances. But this attitude that I've seen a lot of, which is the most self-defeating attitude, which is just this constant anxiety, this constant dread where you don't really know what's going to happen. You know, you have to ask yourself, what's that getting you? You're not getting anywhere by thinking like that. It's just making you feel worse. So, if that's how you want to live your life, that's fine. But when I look around, those people are the most unhappy. the people that still have some anxiety like myself and other people, but they're just living their life. They're living it one day at a time. They are living it how they choose to live by doing the things that they enjoy. The people who enjoy programming and still feel like they're being valuable as programmers. They're doing that. I'm certainly doing that. Like I said, like look at the business that I'm in. I'm in the business of coding interviews. That thing can just change overnight. It's been the case that, you know, everybody's been saying coding interviews are going to go away. You don't think I had any sort of anxiety about that? Of course I did. But I didn't really care that much because even if it goes away, that's not my identity. Coding uh interviews or even programming or even some of these other things, my identity is that, you know, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to compete with anybody because life isn't a competition. I know that's like a toxic way to view things, but it kind of is a competition. And if you're willing to outwork other people, which is how I get a lot of my gratification from that, I'll tell you straight up. People always say you shouldn't compare yourself to other people. Just compare yourself to yourself. I do that, too. You know, I I'm into self-improvement, but you know, beating somebody else, there's a certain gratification you get from that. And when I see people with the attitude of panic and fear and anxiety, well, at first I feel bad for them because I used to be in their same shoes and I know it's not always easy to kind of get through that. But I sincerely think I could compete with anybody. And I think really anyone can. I think at each level that you're willing to do the things that other people aren't, you separate yourself from an entire class of people. You do that again and again. you only really need to do it like three or four times in life and all of a sudden you're at like a level that is very hard for other people to touch. If you have anxiety or some kind of uncertainty, at least try to point it in the right direction. At least try to make those feelings and that energy work for you rather than against you. Don't be paralyzed in fear. And I know that's easier said than done, but trust me when I say that I followed the exact same advice that I'm telling you. And this is where it got me. It got me to a point where I have a lot of skills that I would have never imagined. even chose to learn them. And I don't think there's anything special about me. I really think anybody can do