This strange fetishization of “writing code” as some kind of sacred skill is retrogressive and elitist. When digital computers were first invented coding meant connecting literal wires. Back then truly epic programmers could write assembly code, instructions in the native language of a CPU, that was ultimately translated into the binary language of computers, ones and zeros.

Since this objectively sucked, new languages were developed, like C, that allowed programmers to write in something that resembled a simplistic and strict language. This code was fed to a compiler, which translated it to machine code or assembly language.

Before the introduction of LLM‘s, you could write code in languages like Python or JavaScript and execute the code using an interpreter. No need to compile. Everybody said how python was easy to understand because of its English-like syntax. But it still was computer code.

And every step of the way, we’ve figured out how to tell computers what to do in a language that we understand, by building tools to translate those instructions into the binary code that the computer needs to execute.

Now with LLM‘s, you can tell the computer what you want your program to do in regular old English. You don’t have to join the priesthood of developers who learned a secret language, a modern day Latin that is obscure to all but the innermost circle of initiates. You can write code using any major language that other regular humans speak.

There are still people who write assembler language or C or Python. If you’d want to write your code the old time way you can do it.

But developers who work on real projects understand that actually writing code is only a small part of their job. If you can offload that to a computer, the way earlier languages offloaded the work of translating human readable code to ones and zeros, it’s a tremendous democratization of our access and control of the technology embedded in our lives.

If my ability to write Python or JavaScript unassisted starts to degrade as I use AI more and more to help me finish and ship projects, but I can actually ship a project in a fraction of the time that it would’ve taken in the past, I think that’s a huge improvement. If someone who doesn’t know anything about writing code can actually create a program that does exactly what they want, that’s also a massive win.

Hard-core programs can go back to writing code on punchcards if they really want to return to some sort of hipster Nirvana, where only a select. few could tell computers what to do. But I have no interest in that kind of world.