Experience Doesn’t Disappear. It Moves Up the Stack
I realized something peculiar this weekend.
This year might be the last year I ever write production code entirely on my own.
Fourteen months ago, I experimented with Cursor by building an app without allowing myself to write any code. It was painful, but after three weeks, I actually got there.
This weekend, I ran a similar experiment using Claude Code. This time, the app worked from my very first prompt and has rarely had any issues since. It has been an absolute blast to build like this. I have not written any code, but I have written a lot of English.
I haven’t written any code, but I’ve written a lot of English.
Times are definitely changing. This shift is affecting everyone in our space, juniors and seniors alike. It is hard to know whether my fifteen years of experience debugging browser quirks will still be useful a year from now. It is just as hard to imagine how junior developers will earn a seat at the table in the near future.
We may not be able to see exactly what is coming, but something is definitely on its way.
The hottest new programming language is English
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) January 24, 2023
Almost three years ago, Andrej Karpathy said that “the hottest new programming language is English.” At the time, it felt provocative. Now it feels accurate.
Perhaps machines will solve how we compose components in React. Maybe they will decide tabs versus spaces for us once and for all. Maybe it no longer matters whether templates live next to where they are used or in some carefully curated folder structure. Maybe the machine will show us a more efficient way to express intent and to interpret it.
If my deep dive this week taught me anything, it is this. We are writing less manual code with every passing day. If you want to build, ship, and compete this year, you are going to have to leave more of the implementation in the hands of machines.
But maybe experience does not disappear. Maybe it just moves up the stack.
Not into writing more code, but into knowing what to build, how to ask for it, and when the answer looks right or subtly wrong. The keyboard matters less. Judgment matters more. Taste matters. Architecture still matters.
And if this all leads us toward Judgment Day, at least it comes with perks. No more bikeshedding. No more tabs versus spaces. And no more arguing about where to put the damn components.
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