Nobody Likes Programming

A rant written on a bad day — or maybe a lucid one.

The current dev sphere is like the last stages of the late 70’s disco dance fever, with the difference that instead of bell trousers, and shiny jackets, you are adults wearing hoodies, headphones and a mustache. 

Programming is over-commercialized, you’ve to deal with legacy code bases at the same time that you’ve to keep up with the latest frameworks, like a born-to-dance person who is afraid to dance, because you don’t know the last choreography. 

Some people dance better than others (or they were just at the right place), and got the best girl (FANG), and became oracles on how you should dance (program) if you want the golden ticket. 

So you have these dancers, wearing funny clothes, moving in an embarrassing way, dancing any rhythm that is cool today, shouting to the 4 cardinal points that dance music is their most loved hobby… they forgot what got them into dancing in the first place. 

Ok, sorry if you really like programming, and I’ve hurt your feelings, but read very carefully the following sentence:

You don’t like programming.
You like solving problems.
You get a high when something you imagine comes to life.
You like getting a big check for making machines do useful things.

Let me reintroduce you to Rock & Roll, the purest form of music:
Get a band of friends, anything that makes noise, and let them create music.
This band doesn’t have formal studies — they just know what type of music they like, and they will start copying classic authors and invent totally different genres.

This is what is happening with AI.
It allows creative people to solve problems mixing solutions from fields they barely know…

All the programming flavors are their own rabbit hole.
You know what can be done — but jumping inside means months and years of learning and perfection until you’re able to produce the things you dreamed of the first day you were staring into that knowledge abyss.

AI has transformed that abyss into a morning walk.
You can — in the same day — scrape the web, produce advanced statistical analysis, and train your LLM, maybe coronating the day with some procedural 3D rendering…

All this by just having some general knowledge about those fields and a base on computer science.

If you don’t use AI for coding, there’s no place for you in this new world.
Nobody is forcing you to stay — you can go and buy a farm.
But if you stay, start showing that you are able to produce solutions, not code —
because code has become cheaper than air.