Coding is over. Now what?
I never thought things were going to change this much.
From the beginning, it was obvious that Large Language Models were not a joke, but I thought they had fundamental limitations preventing them from getting too far.
I was wrong.
Around 2012 or 2013, my former employer went on a hiring spree for software developers. The criteria to qualify for a role were owning a computer and convincingly stating you wanted to learn programming. The bar was low. We had the budget and patience to train people in basic front-end coding, and we needed warm bodies, so we hired everyone, some unqualified.
It was a different time.
Large Language Models have blown past every limitation I had imagined to a point where today, you'd have to be crazy to hire untrained people to write code. I'd go as far as to say you'd be crazy to hire anyone without "significant" experience in the field. We might disagree on the meaning of "significant" in this context, but it's clear the bar is much higher because of AI.
Change in this field is nothing new. I've been building software for long enough to appreciate how much we have to reinvent ourselves every year. But it has never felt this fast.
Every week, we get a new version that leaps and bounds around everything we've seen. Every new model is faster and better. They are now solving problems that nobody—and I mean nobody—thought possible a few years ago.
Yes, of course, a part of me is worried! I never planned for this future, and I still don't know how much things will change in the coming years, but I also have some encouraging thoughts.
The fundamental fear in everyone's mind is whether we'll wake up tomorrow and find a model that can do everything we do today but cheaper, faster, and better. I don't think that'll happen any time soon.
Large Language Models have changed how we write code, but code is just the expression of a much more complex process. Coding is how we communicate our ideas to a computer, but that has never been the hardest part.
The most competent people you know didn't earn that title because they remembered what code to write, memorized documentation, or typed faster than anyone else. Instead, they consistently do three things better than everyone:
- They know how to identify the right problem to solve.
- They know how to frame this problem in ways where finding the correct solution becomes inevitable.
- They know how to shape that solution into an elegant, maintainable, and scalable design.
When you get to this point, writing code to solve the problem is easy, and that's where Large Language Models shine.
Coding will become fully commoditized in the coming years, but your brain will not. Artificial Intelligence is a hell of an assistant, but it can't replace people yet.
In fact, I believe the opposite to be true.
Every single invention in the history of computing has enabled more people to write software, not fewer. The easier something gets, the broader its inner circle becomes. Artificial Intelligence will help the artist write code. The accountant, the writer, the banker, and the history professor can now join a club that was previously exclusive to a few.
We'll build more software. Faster and—hopefully—better software. The amount we need is unbounded, so we'll keep building.
Assuming you've been writing software like me, I'd recommend you learn as much as possible about AI and how to use it to write better code. With the excitement and the amount of information out there, this shouldn't be hard.
People asking others to ditch programming because it doesn't have a future are doing you a huge disservice. History will not look kindly on them.
Building software is here to stay.
It will look very different—it already does—but there's never been a better time to be a developer.