I bought my first programming book in 2004, "The C Programming Language" by K&R.\nI had been making video games by myself since 2001 using simpler tools such as\nMultimedia Fusion, and had dabbled with Visual Basic too. But this time I wanted\nto get serious and do real programming, despite being just a kid.
\nWhat dragged me into programming was the promise of building all my ideas. I\nalways liked making pixels move on the screen. I'm not sure why. After my\ninitiation into game development, I moved on to other challenges such as\ncomputational fluid dynamics at university, which I enjoyed very much. More\npixels moving on the screen, but this time backed by science, and full of\nmeaning. Programming was a craft and a superpower.
\nThroughout my career as a web and mobile software engineer, I had the privilege\nof becoming well-known for open source libraries and (as a result) conference\ntalks. Many of you may know me for teaching reactive programming, for example.\nSaying farewell to programming is by extension saying farewell to reactive\nprogramming too.
\n2026 is very likely the last year I will write code with my own hands, and\nmight be one of the last years when I still read code. AI has changed\neverything. The likelihood of slop is decreasing with every new frontier model\nrelease, and the economic reasons to type code line by line are vanishing\nhave vanished.
\nI am not sad about it. I very much enjoy the new tools and the productivity\nboost. It means I now have an entire team of "myself equivalents" that I can\ncoordinate from my phone on the beach, or with my voice while driving.
\nBut given that this is almost certainly the end of my more than two decades of\ninputting code into keyboards, I believe this deserves an intentional pause. A\nminute of silence, you could say. Programming is dead, and I don't want\nto dismiss all of my journey as merely the inefficient pre-AI struggle.
\nWhat exactly has "died"? It would be unfair to say it was merely about "writing\ncode", as if one just had to sit down and type. It would also be incorrect to\nsay what I'm doing today (pull request reviews, product and UX design, planning,\ncoordination with customers and stakeholders, and team building) is just a\nversion of programming. No, it is not.
\nFor me, programming was about living in the technical guts of the computer.\nComputers could do things for us only if they were programmed. Without\nprogramming, computers were dead and pointless. We were the ones who went inside\nand instilled them with life. There was no other way of giving meaning to a\ncomputer or its software.
\nFor most people (also known as "non-techies"), computers were black boxes. And\nwhen computers didn't give them what they wanted, we—programmers, developers,\nengineers, coders—were the ones they turned to. We had a mental model of how\nthings worked (sometimes imperfect, but sufficient for the job) and the ability\nto correctly express in a computer language what needed to change. All of this\nused to be, in my mentors' words, "highly non-trivial".
\nSitting in front of a computer thus meant marvelling at humanity's masterpiece.\nComplex software (such as operating systems and massively multiplayer online\ngames) required billions of lines of code planned by, written by, and tested by\nthousands of people. These were the Egyptian pyramids of software.
\nBut sitting in front of a computer today means marvelling at what AI has made,\nthe kinds of games it has decompiled, the research breakthroughs it is making,\nthe productivity enabled by concurrent agents, and much more.
\nWhen you look back at it, the programming profession lasted roughly 50 years as\nan industry, depending on how you count when it started and when it ended.\nOther professions, such as farmers and lawyers, have been around for thousands\nof years. Dentists for 300+ years. Bus drivers some 150+ years. Software\nengineering will go down in history as a transitory profession, not unlike\nthe occupation of a computer.
\nWhile I was still into it, I very much enjoyed programming. It was a form of\npuzzle-solving, but it was also about organization, communication, planning,\ncreativity, and exploration.
\nBut I will not miss it. I won't miss the endless arguments about little\nsyntactic annoyances, troubleshooting frustrating bugs that stalled progress for\nhours or days, and all that typing that strained my wrists. Nope.
\nI got into programming because I wanted to make software come alive and build\nuseful services for customers, friends, and family. I'm doing all of that now\nfar more prolifically than before, with AI. Maybe some people enjoy the typing\nand the microscopic troubleshooting as a hobby or something like that. I don't.\nI want to make software.
\nFarewell, programming.
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