Then someday somebody took that story from you. They told a different story: one where someone on a stage, in a business suit that you’d never wear, with a smug grin that you’d never wear, talked words into a computer and, the little traitor, it obeyed him. He talked words like you or I would, like any simpleton would, and it obeyed him. And the crowd cheered because they knew that now the glowing rectangles belonged to them as well, and not just you, with your wizardly spells that took years of study to master.
This article made me feel a lot of feelings.
I don’t write much code by hand anymore these days. It still happens, but most code I write is generated by an LLM. This is a very exciting time for, because for the first time in quite a while, the fundamentals of programming seem to be changing.
But this also took me a while to accept. A big part of my identity was tied to being able to talk to computers. Being “special”, in that sense. This is now gone, and there is some grief in that. It’s not in the foreground, but it’s a small, omni-present sting. It’s a strange place to be in, but for now, I’ll treat it as a “growing pain”.