What we are losing

Nolan Lawson, in We mourn our craft:

Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it.

We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.”

I worked professionally as a computer programmer from 1980 to 2023, so I have 43 years of experience “sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM.” 

I wrote millions of lines of code, from scratch; a good chunk of that was without benefit of the Internet, and its infinite reference library. None of it was AI-assisted.

I know the power—and the frustration, oh the frustration—of code, test, iterate, test, iterate, test. It’s how I learned my craft, it’s how I developed an intimate relationship with the machine.

Like Lawson, I will miss the “feeling of holding code in our hands,” both as a trade and as a sort of spiritual practice.