Programmers complaining about AI-generated code sound strangely familiar.
In 1492, Johannes Trithemius wrote “In Praise of Scribes”, defending handwritten manuscripts against a dangerous new technology: The printing press.
His arguments? Printed books were inferior. They wouldn’t last. And people preferred printing because they were lazy.
“Who doesn’t know how great is the distance between a scribed and a printed book?”
About those who argued that printing made copying by hand unnecessary, he wrote that such a person was trying to “conceal his own sloth.”
Another 15th-century critic of printing, the Dominican Filippo de Strata, was considerably less diplomatic:
“The pen is a virgin; the printing press is a wh*re.”
Now replace “printed book” with “AI-generated code.” The arguments become remarkably modern:
“Generated code is inferior.”
“Nobody will be able to maintain it.”
“People use AI because they’re too lazy to learn the craft.”
“Now anyone can produce code, including people who don’t understand what they’re producing.”
And here’s the important part:
The critics of printing weren’t entirely wrong.
Early printing reproduced errors at scale. It threatened established professions. It lowered the barrier to publishing nonsense. It produced work that skilled manuscript makers considered crude.
What they got wrong was confusing the process with the product.
The value of a book was never in the physical act of copying every letter by hand.
It was in what the book had to say.
Software is no different.
`Machine code → assembly → high-level languages → libraries → frameworks → generated code → intent.`
At every step, we moved further away from manually producing the final artifact and closer to describing what we actually wanted to create. And every generation got an opportunity to accuse the next one of “not really knowing how computers work.”
Maybe manually writing code won’t disappear. Handwriting didn’t disappear either.
But ultimately: Content is king.
If a book teaches you something valuable, does it matter whether its letters were written by a monk or produced by a printing press?
If software is correct, maintainable, secure and solves a real problem, does it matter whether every line was typed manually or generated?
Judge the output by its value, not by the romanticism of the process that produced it.
And there’s a perfect ending to the story: Trithemius’ In Praise of Scribes was printed.
Some things really don’t change.
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