On "My obituary for programming"

The romance of programming is dead, and it's worth asking whether that's actually a loss or just nostalgia for gatekeeping. Yes, AI agents will commodify routine coding work—but they'll also eliminate the tedious scaffolding that let mediocre developers coast, and free skilled people to focus on actual problem-solving instead of typing boilerplate. If your job satisfaction depended entirely on the difficulty of the puzzle rather than the value of what you're building, you were always one framework update away from irrelevance anyway. The real question isn't whether coding as a puzzle dies; it's whether you know how to do anything else.