Coding in the time of AI

You won't see the code yourself anymore, the robots will write it for you. Half the time, the code they write will be garbage, or nonsense. Slop. But it's so cheap to write that the computer can just throw it away and write some more, over and over, until it finally happens to work. Is it elegant? Who cares? It's cheap. Ten thousand times cheaper than paying you to write it, so we can afford to waste a lot of code along the way. If you were one of those crafters—the people who wrote idiomatic code that made that programming language sing—there's a real grief here. It's not as serious as when we know a human language is dying out, but it's not entirely dissimilar, either. -Anil Dash