The end of manual programming

`1:00:35`

And at different levels of abstraction. When I'm working in Ruby code, and we have a lot of Ruby code because it's in our entire business, and I'm asking agents to make changes to that code, I still sweat the details. What I'm coming to realize is that the economic payoff of that sweat is diminishing rapidly. The reason why I, for 25 years, was sweating every line of code so judiciously was because I knew the payoff of keeping an architecture coherent and malleable was software that could change and evolve- quickly with a small team, and not exorbitant cost, and not introducing a bunch of bugs when you change one thing over the other. That was the driving economic argument for why you should write beautiful code, 'cause beautiful code is easier to understand, it is simpler, it is more malleable. That was premised on humans doing the modifications. I think it is an open question to which degree this still matters. Now, it does matter, and the reason I say that, at least for the moment, is that tokens are still scarce. At this moment in time, we are all token limited. Well, not all, but anyone who doesn't have endless budgets are token limited. So therefore, there is great payoff to writing systems that agents have an easier time dealing with and evolving without having to relearn the entire context. Just like humans, if they can make iterations and changes to the code base without wrecking the architecture, they can make the next change just as cheaply as the last one.

And this is the classic ball of mud where you end up with a system that's a ball of mud-... because it's just put together in a way where nothing is connected and it's just a real mess, right? I've seen that with agents, and I've seen it in our own code bases where, again, the first PR is, like, mediocre of quality, and then if you add another PR on top of that, and then five more down the line, it's not very good, right? So there's still a payoff to that, but that payoff is premised on our current moment. I am now able to... And this is, by the way, where the AI psychosis really comes in, when you try to extrapolate what nine months from now it's gonna look like. What two years from now it's gonna look like. But as an intellectual experiment, I think the first computer I used was a Commodore 64.

`1:03:11`

It had one megahertz CPU and 64K of memory. Everyone who wrote software for that machine internalized certain constraints. Well, all the constraints. That machine was nothing but constraints. If you put that programmer in a time machine and teleported him or her to 2026 and gave them a modern computer today and said, "Now write me a piece of software," they'd be lost for a little bit because all their techniques and all their heuristics would simply be wrong. Or not wrong, because efficient software is still beautiful. They would be out of date with the value that they could create. The amount of optimization you have to apply for a one megahertz computer to produce a video game is just very different from what you have to apply today.

`1:04:17`

It's romantic too, though. Let's also imagine that. This is one of the things, whenever we bemoan modern car culture, for example, right? And then we think like, "Oh, wasn't it better when we all had the horse-drawn carriages and so on?" No, it wasn't. Do you know what New York smelled like when we used horses for transportation? It was an open sewer. They just shat everywhere.

`1:04:43`

... to experience the nostalgic past, when you don't get the all the furry impulses and senses.

`1:04:57`

It's already happening, the romanticization of handwritten code. And I have some of it because it was a very romantic era. I'm grateful to have been alive for 20 years of economically valuable handwritten code. That was a, that was a good time.

`1:05:20`

Correct. Because handwritten beautiful code exists as much today as it did yesterday. There are people who willfully write new video games for the Commodore 64, or for the second Mega Drive, or for other vintage consoles. In fact, one of my favorite video games of late is ModRetro's. Do you know Palmer Luckey's-... side geschäft, which is recreating old consoles. So he's recreated the Game Boy.

`1:05:51`

It's amazing. Look it up. It's really cool. But what's even cooler than the fact that he recreated this hardware and the original chunkiness, but brought it up to date with sort of modern screens and so on, now they just put out the Nintendo 64 too. Incredible. Super cool. Wild attention to detail, input lag, and all the other things. But what's also very cool, that one, I have to wave. That one right there, and hover over it, 'cause then you get to see what I'm talking about. That is the Chromatic-... Tetris re-implementation.

`1:06:23`

I played a lot of Tetris on the original Game Boy. Probably one of my top three favorite games of all time. And they rewrote it with one change. If you hit up, the brick slams. And that speeds up the game by about 400%. It is an incredible game, and it's a new Game Boy game. I think the Game Boy came out in- '89 or '88. It's a very old machine. The fact that there's still people writing new old games is awesome, and the reason they do it in part, now here they're doing it because they want Tetris, but there are people who do it just for the love of the constraints, for the love of the romantic notion of writing that. Just like there are people still riding around on horses, not to get places fast, but because they like the mode of transportation where it's a literal biological being below you propelling you forward.

`1:07:31`

We gave birth to this moment. What a privilege, and I feel that very personally because I... Almost all of the code I've ever written is public code. The vast majority of my career has been dedicated to writing open source code, and therefore, some of that code, some of those beautiful lines are in the training set. And in fact, I've heard people do this when they write Ruby code. They ask the agent, "Write it like DHH would." And they're pleased with the result, and that does warm my heart a little bit, that I helped give birth to this moment in my tiny little small part. And anyone else who contributed open source code or any code at all that the agents have had access to over the last, well, entire time programming has been around as a discipline, is now part of these new agent overlords.

`1:08:29`

Am I sad that if I had to get a job tomorrow, it's unlikely that I could apply my skills in such a way that I would be paid to write these manual lines of code? No. I did it for 25 years. Like, I wanna see something new here, especially if we're all gonna live forever, which I hope we don't. Maybe we'll get to that. But, like, I've done that. That's enough. That's fine. I don't feel any more nostalgic about that than I do about the fact that I don't have to spend my time in the field with a hoe or at the assembly line.

`1:09:30`

I am grateful for every moment that brought me to where I am right now, and therefore, I have also tried, and maybe this did take some practice. I will concede that. Maybe I wasn't always like this, but stoic philosophy, amor fati, loving your fate, is an incredibly liberating way to live. And you could attack that and say, "Well, that's a point of privilege." True, but also I had the same directional point when I didn't have all this, quote unquote, "privilege." So I think there's a way to live and interact with the world where you accept the things you can change and the things you cannot change and fall in love with all of it. Fall in love with the fact that the world today has jumped two decades forward into technology industry from where it was last year.