The end of manual programming

`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.