https://x.com/i/article/2103566873501835264

Coding is dead, long live Coding

To my friends mourning the loss of their most loved activity, I feel your pain. I got into programming as a hobby, my first introductions to it being in high school and discovering the <marquee> tag. Ever since that joyful discovery, I couldn't stop myself from making things, tinkering, and looking forward to the thrill of solving the next problem. I would pore over every line of code, thinking hard about how to make my programs more elegant, performant, even beautiful.

I think @thorstenball put it best:

"The craft of writing code will disappear. Yes, there are still Italian shoe makers around. But look at your feet."

As beneficiaries of AI, we owe everything to the people that came before us: the people who discovered, engineered, and created the knowledge and civilization that we now live in and build on top of. Just look around you. Even everyday, ordinary things were brought to life by someone who was passionate about solving a problem. Those people are now mourning the loss of that tactile feeling of solving a problem with nothing more than your own hands and the knowledge built upon the shoulders of giants.

Coding is dead, but yet coding still lives on in the weights of the models we now use, the frameworks we build with, and the programming languages we write with. We should not shame the people who mourn because we owe everything to them. And yet, while others mourn, we can also rejoice. Personally, as a self taught programmer, I am thrilled at the thought of more people discovering the joy of building things. While it might be tempting to think that the automation of coding is the end of things, I think it's a new beginning, where a new generation of programmers using natural language to express their intent and goals will build things faster and at a higher quality than we could ever produce by hand.

It might not seem like it's possible right now. But I believe it will. Builders using AI will produce things we could never do before.

And that abundance will be glorious! If anything, I feel more love for programming than I ever did before. What I used to be limited in by my own ability, I can now will into existence if I can figure out the right incantations, the right prompts and context, to drive an agent towards the vision I see so clearly in my head.

So while some might say that they're "excited to see what you build" with empty feelings, I want to believe that many of us are truly excited at what people who've never experienced the joy of building can do.

I can't wait to see what you build!