Future of programming

`1:38:21`

and that I started doing once I typed it out myself. But it gave me the confidence that, you know what? If I need to do some iOS programming myself, I haven't done that in probably six years was the last time I dabbled in it. I never really built anything for real. I feel highly confident now that I could sit down with AI and I could have something in the app store by the end of the week. I would not have that confidence unless I had a pair of programming body like AI. I don't actually use it very much for Ruby code. I'm occasionally impressed whenever I try it, they're like, oh, it got this one thing right. That is truly remarkable and it's actually pretty good. And then I'll ask you two more questions and I go like, oh yeah, okay. If you were my junior programmer, I'd start tapping my fingers and going like, you gotta shape up. Now the great thing of course is we can just wait five minutes. The Anthropic CEO seems to think that 90% of all code by the end of the year is gonna be written by AI. I am more than a little bit skeptical about that, but I'm open-minded about the prospect that programming potentially

`1:39:22`

will turn into a horse when done manually. Something we do recreationally is no longer a mode of transportation to get around LA. You're not gonna saddle up and go to the grocery store and pick up stuff from whole foods in your saddlebacks. That's just not a thing anymore. That could be the future for programming, for manual programming entirely possible. I also don't care. Like even though we have great renditions of all the best songs, as I said, there are millions of people who love to play the guitar. It may no longer have as much economic value as it once did. I think that I'm quite convinced is true that we perhaps have seen the peak. Now I understand the paradox, when the price of something goes down, actually the overall usage goes up and total spend on that activity goes up. That could also happen maybe. But what we're seeing right now is that a lot of the big shops, a lot of the big companies are not hiring like they were five years ago. They're not anticipating they're gonna need tons more programmers.

`1:40:23`

Controversially, Tobi actually put out a memo inside of Shopify asking everyone who's considering hiring someone to ask the question, could this be done by AI? Now, he's further ahead on this question than I am. I look at some of the coding trenches and I go like, I'd love to use AI more, and I see how it's making us more productive, but it's not yet at the level where I just go like, oh, we have this project. Let me just give it to the AI agent and it's gonna go off and do it. — But let's just be honest. You're like a Clint-Eastwood type character cowboy and on a horse seeing cars going around and you're like, well. — That's part of it. And I think that's, it is important to have that humility that what you are good at may no longer be what society values. This has happened a million times in history that you could have been exceptionally good at saddle making, for example. That's something that a lot of people used to care about because everyone rode a horse. And then suddenly riding a horse became this niche hobby that there's some people care about it, but not nearly as many. That's okay. Now the other thing of this

`1:41:23`

is I've had the good fortune to... I've been a programmer for nearly 30 years. That was a great run. I try to look at life in this way that I've already been blessed with decades of economically viable, highly valuable ways of translating what I like best in the working world to write Ruby code. That that was so valuable that I could make millions and millions of dollars doing it. And if that's over tomorrow, I shouldn't look at that with regret. I should look at it with gratitude. — But you're also a highly experienced, brilliant and opinionated human being, so it's really interesting to get your opinion on the future of the horse because it, you know, there's a lot of young people listening to this who love programming or who are excited by the possibility of building stuff with software, with Ruby on Rails, that kind of language. This and now the possibility.

`1:42:24`

— But is it a career? — Is it a career? And if indeed a single person can build more and more and more with the help of AI, like how do they learn that skill? Is this a good skill to learn? I mean, that to me is the real mystery here, because I think it's still absolutely true that you have to learn how to program from scratch currently. But how do you balance those two skills? Because I too, as I'm thinking now, there is a scary slipping away of skill that happens. In a matter of like really minutes on a particular piece of code. It's scary. Not the way driving, you know, when you have a car drive for you doesn't quite slip away that fast. So that really scares me. So when somebody comes up to me and asks me like, how do I learn to program, I don't know what the advice is because I think it's not enough