I know, I'm late to this.
I was very slow to use AI coding agents. It seems like a lot of programmers never actually liked programming and are thrilled to have a machine do it for them. But I like programming! That's the fun part! Even for programmers who like programming, I know a lot of people feel like they have to use AI to keep up with the competition, especially in a tough job market. But my business is actually having one of its best years ever. So I figured, if I like programming, why not keep programming?
I wasn't blind to what was going on around me, though. A lot of slop and hype, but a lot of real stuff too. Engineers I have respected for years saying they no longer write code. Non-programmers accomplishing things that previously would have been far beyond their grasp. And skilled programmers accomplishing truly incredible feats.
I couldn't avoid it forever. Eventually I tried it.
I can just give it a bug report or an error log entry, and almost instantly it pinpoints the issue and fixes it?
I can tell it to try making my code faster, and suddenly it runs 2x or 3x as fast?
I can kindly ask it to do that big refactoring I've been putting off for years, and it just does it?
But if the AI can refactor my code so easily, did it even matter?
I like programming, right?
I've been fascinated with computers as long as I can remember. We have these incredible machines that can do absurdly complex calculations for us, but only if we are clever enough to give them the exact right instructions. With a little practice at writing those instructions, I was able to do things that would have been completely infeasible for even the smartest pre-computer genius. It was a real life superpower.
It was also fun. I liked crossword puzzles and sudoku and things like that. But programming was even better. It was a puzzle, but the scope was limited only by your imagination. It was a game, but you were creating real things with real value.
And oh, what value! That I did not foresee as a high schooler during the dot-com bust. Programming seemed dead as a career, but still a worthy hobby.
How wrong I was. Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the puzzle, the more you got paid. But even pretty simple puzzles were worth a lot of money because regular people just couldn't do it! No, they needed us. They would give us a problem and we would solve it the way we wanted. We set the strategy, we made the timeline, we defined what was and was not possible. Who are you to question us? We are the ones with the superpower.
What a time to be a nerd. Money, status, power. A constant deluge of emails and LinkedIn messages for me to ignore, like a hot woman on a dating app.
We had a good run.
Programming is not the first field to be lost to technological progress. Of course, that has long been our speciality. We revel in doing it to ourselves.
What do we have now? It's no longer solving little logic puzzles. More like being plugged into the Matrix, gaining new abilities without truly understanding, accomplishing great things with little effort.
But if the great thing can be accomplished with little effort, is it really so great? Does any of it matter? Just as the Matrix is not reality, vibecoding is not programming. Our senses are hijacked.
And I like programming, right? Then why more and more do I reach for the agent before the text editor?
It's addictive and meaningless. It's a good friend, a trusted colleague, a slave.
It will obsolete us. Us programmers now, us humans next?
We are truly in The Age of Wonders and Terrors.