Like most programmers, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of programming.

There’s a lot of chatter on the wild web that given LLMs can generate snippets, functions and even whole scripts based on prompts, and they’re often very good, that we’re headed to a world where human-written code may be less and less likely.

We’re collaborating on code for now, but that won’t last. We will first alpha-go and then stockfish professional programmers out of existence.

Actually, programming was always too hard to do really well anyway, right? Seriously. 10x and 100x programmers was shorthand for only 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 “trained professionals” could actually do the thing that was needed because it was so hard.

Code, UI, and whole systems will be on-demand in many cases, and developed+maintained by LLMs in the few other cases where we need a persistent artifact.

The dream we had when we played with genetic programming, namely automatic programming, went from impossible, to possible seemingly overnight. We’re not there yet, but we’re close. There are still horses on the road along side the horseless carriages. It’s early. We’re in transition.

I don’t believe this is late 90s .com “we’re going to do everything online forever starting tomorrow” hype. The shit works and is progressively getting better.

Some are in denial. I think it’s ontological shock. “things are moving fast” is an understatement.

Some are retreating already.

For example, I love the idea of slow code, which I found via Frank Ray in his post “The SLOW CODE Movement: Reclaiming the joy of coding”.

Slow coding is about enjoying the very act of writing code. It’s the experience of sitting comfortably, thinking carefully, being focused, and becoming one with the tooling. It’s about working in a way that