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[21]The New Yorker
[22]Personal History
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain.
Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.
By [23]James Somers
November 13, 2023
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Artificial intelligence still cant beat a human when it comes to
programming. But its only a matter of time.Illustration by Dev
Valladares
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I have always taken it for granted that, just as my parents made sure
that I could read and write, I would make sure that my kids could
program computers. It is among the newer arts but also among the most
essential, and ever more so by the day, encompassing everything from
filmmaking to physics. Fluency with code would round out my childrens
literacy—and keep them employable. But as I write this my wife is
pregnant with our first child, due in about three weeks. I code
professionally, but, by the time that child can type, coding as a
valuable skill might have faded from the world.
I first began to believe this on a Friday morning this past summer,
while working on a small hobby project. A few months back, my friend
Ben and I had resolved to create a Times-style crossword puzzle
entirely by computer. In 2018, wed made a Saturday puzzle with the
help of software and were surprised by how little we contributed—just
applying our taste here and there. Now we would attempt to build a
crossword-making program that didnt require a human touch.
When weve taken on projects like this in the past, theyve had both a
hardware component and a software component, with Bens strengths
running toward the former. We once made a neon sign that would glow
when the subway was approaching the stop near our apartments. Ben bent
the glass and wired up the transformers circuit board. I wrote code to
process the transit data. Ben has some professional coding experience
of his own, but it was brief, shallow, and now about twenty years out
of date; the serious coding was left to me. For the new crossword
project, though, Ben had introduced a third party. Hed signed up for a
ChatGPT Plus subscription and was using GPT-4 as a coding assistant.
[24]More on A.I.
[25]Sign up for The New Yorkers weekly Science & Technology
newsletter.
Something strange started happening. Ben and I would talk about a bit
of software we wanted for the project. Then, a shockingly short time
later, Ben would deliver it himself. At one point, we wanted a command
that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I
thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed,
tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and
while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got
code that ran perfectly.
Fine: commands like those are notoriously fussy, and everybody looks
them up anyway. Its not real programming. A few days later, Ben talked
about how it would be nice to have an iPhone app to rate words from the
dictionary. But he had no idea what a pain it is to make an iPhone app.
Id tried a few times and never got beyond something that half worked.
I found Apples programming environment forbidding. You had to learn
not just a new language but a new program for editing and running code;
you had to learn a zoo of “U.I. components” and all the complicated
ways of stitching them together; and, finally, you had to figure out
how to package the app. The mountain of new things to learn never
seemed worth it. The next morning, I woke up to an app in my in-box
that did exactly what Ben had said he wanted. It worked perfectly, and
even had a cute design. Ben said that hed made it in a few hours.
GPT-4 had done most of the heavy lifting.
By now, most people have had experiences with A.I. Not everyone has
been impressed. Ben recently said, “I didnt start really respecting it
until I started having it write code for me.” I suspect that
non-programmers who are skeptical by nature, and who have seen ChatGPT
turn out wooden prose or bogus facts, are still underestimating whats
happening.
Bodies of knowledge and skills that have traditionally taken lifetimes
to master are being swallowed at a gulp. Coding has always felt to me
like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to
write a eulogy for it. I keep thinking of Lee Sedol. Sedol was one of
the worlds best Go players, and a national hero in South Korea, but is
now best known for losing, in 2016, to a computer program called
AlphaGo. Sedol had walked into the competition believing that he would
easily defeat the A.I. By the end of the days-long match, he was proud
of having eked out a single game. As it became clear that he was going
to lose, Sedol said, in a press conference, “I want to apologize for
being so powerless.” He retired three years later. Sedol seemed weighed
down by a question that has started to feel familiar, and urgent: What
will become of this thing Ive given so much of my life to?
My first enchantment with computers came when I was about six years
old, in Montreal in the early nineties, playing Mortal Kombat with my
oldest brother. He told me about some “fatalities”—gruesome, witty ways
of killing your opponent. Neither of us knew how to inflict them. He
dialled up an FTP server (where files were stored) in an MS-DOS
terminal and typed obscure commands. Soon, he had printed out a page of
codes—instructions for every fatality in the game. We went back to the
basement and exploded each others heads.
I thought that my brother was a hacker. Like many programmers, I
dreamed of breaking into and controlling remote systems. The point
wasnt to cause mayhem—it was to find hidden places and learn hidden
things. “My crime is that of curiosity,” goes “The Hackers Manifesto,”
written in 1986 by Loyd Blankenship. My favorite scene from the 1995
movie “Hackers” is when Dade Murphy, a newcomer, proves himself at an
underground club. Someone starts pulling a rainbow of computer books
out of a backpack, and Dade recognizes each one from the cover: the
green book on international Unix environments; the red one on
N.S.A.-trusted networks; the one with the pink-shirted guy on I.B.M.
PCs. Dade puts his expertise to use when he turns on the sprinkler
system at school, and helps right the ballast of an oil tanker—all by
tap-tapping away at a keyboard. The lesson was that knowledge is power.
But how do you actually learn to hack? My family had settled in New
Jersey by the time I was in fifth grade, and when I was in high school
I went to the Borders bookstore in the Short Hills mall and bought
“Beginning Visual C++,” by Ivor Horton. It ran to twelve hundred
pages—my first grimoire. Like many tutorials, it was easy at first and
then, suddenly, it wasnt. Medieval students called the moment at which
casual learners fail the pons asinorum, or “bridge of asses.” The term
was inspired by Proposition 5 of Euclids Elements I, the first truly
difficult idea in the book. Those who crossed the bridge would go on to
master geometry; those who didnt would remain dabblers. Section 4.3 of
“Beginning Visual C++,” on “Dynamic Memory Allocation,” was my bridge
of asses. I did not cross.
But neither did I drop the subject. I remember the moment things began
to turn. I was on a long-haul flight, and Id brought along a boxy
black laptop and a CD-ROM with the Borland C++ compiler. A compiler
translates code you write into code that the machine can run; I had
been struggling for days to get this one to work. By convention, every
coders first program does nothing but generate the words “Hello,
world.” When I tried to run my version, I just got angry error
messages. Whenever I fixed one problem, another cropped up. I had read
the “Harry Potter” books and felt as if I were in possession of a broom
but had not yet learned the incantation to make it fly. Knowing what
might be possible if I did, I kept at it with single-minded devotion.
What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or
skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are
people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles. Imagine
explaining to a simpleton how to assemble furniture over the phone,
with no pictures, in a language you barely speak. Imagine, too, that
the only response you ever get is that youve suggested an absurdity
and the whole thing has gone awry. All the sweeter, then, when you
manage to get something assembled. I have a distinct memory of lying on
my stomach in the airplane aisle, and then hitting Enter one last time.
I sat up. The computer, for once, had done what Id told it to do. The
words “Hello, world” appeared above my cursor, now in the computers
own voice. It seemed as if an intelligence had woken up and introduced
itself to me.
Most of us never became the kind of hackers depicted in “Hackers.” To
“hack,” in the parlance of a programmer, is just to tinker—to express
ingenuity through code. I never formally studied programming; I just
kept messing around, making computers do helpful or delightful little
things. In my freshman year of college, I knew that Id be on the road
during the third round of the 2006 Masters Tournament, when Tiger Woods
was moving up the field, and I wanted to know what was happening in
real time. So I made a program that scraped the leaderboard on
pgatour.com and sent me a text message anytime he birdied or bogeyed.
Later, after reading “Ulysses” in an English class, I wrote a program
that pulled random sentences from the book, counted their syllables,
and assembled haikus—a more primitive regurgitation of language than
youd get from a chatbot these days, but nonetheless capable, I
thought, of real poetry:
Ill flay him alive
Uncertainly he waited
Heavy of the past
I began taking coding seriously. I offered to do programming for a
friends startup. The world of computing, I came to learn, is vast but
organized almost geologically, as if deposited in layers. From the Web
browser down to the transistor, each sub-area or system is built atop
some other, older sub-area or system, the layers dense but legible. The
more one digs, the more one develops what the race-car driver Jackie
Stewart called “mechanical sympathy,” a sense for the machines
strengths and limits, of what one could make it do.
At my friends company, I felt my mechanical sympathy developing. In my
sophomore year, I was watching “Jeopardy!” with a friend when he
suggested that I make a playable version of the show. I thought about
it for a few hours before deciding, with much disappointment, that it
was beyond me. But when the idea came up again, in my junior year, I
could see a way through it. I now had a better sense of what one could
do with the machine. I spent the next fourteen hours building the game.
Within weeks, playing “Jimbo Jeopardy!” had become a regular activity
among my friends. The experience was profound. I could understand why
people poured their lives into craft: there is nothing quite like
watching someone enjoy a thing youve made.
In the midst of all this, I had gone full “Paper Chase” and begun
ignoring my grades. I worked voraciously, just not on my coursework.
One night, I took over a half-dozen machines in a basement computer lab
to run a program in parallel. I laid printouts full of numbers across
the floor, thinking through a pathfinding algorithm. The cost was that
I experienced for real that recurring nightmare in which you show up
for a final exam knowing nothing of the material. (Mine was in Real
Analysis, in the math department.) In 2009, during the most severe
financial crisis in decades, I graduated with a 2.9 G.P.A.
And yet I got my first full-time job easily. I had work experience as a
programmer; nobody asked about my grades. For the young coder, these
were boom times. Companies were getting into bidding wars over top
programmers. Solicitations for experienced programmers were so
aggressive that they complained about “recruiter spam.” The popularity
of university computer-science programs was starting to explode. (My
degree was in economics.) Coding “boot camps” sprang up that could
credibly claim to turn beginners into high-salaried programmers in less
than a year. At one of my first job interviews, in my early twenties,
the C.E.O. asked how much I thought I deserved to get paid. I dared to
name a number that faintly embarrassed me. He drew up a contract on the
spot, offering ten per cent more. The skills of a “software engineer”
were vaunted. At one company where I worked, someone got in trouble for
using HipChat, a predecessor to Slack, to ask one of my colleagues a
question. “Never HipChat an engineer directly,” he was told. We were
too important for that.
This was an era of near-zero interest rates and extraordinary
tech-sector growth. Certain norms were established. Companies like
Google taught the industry that coders were to have free espresso and
catered hot food, world-class health care and parental leave, on-site
gyms and bike rooms, a casual dress code, and “twenty-per-cent time,”
meaning that they could devote one day a week to working on whatever
they pleased. Their skills were considered so crucial and delicate that
a kind of superstition developed around the work. For instance, it was
considered foolish to estimate how long a coding task might take, since
at any moment the programmer might turn over a rock and discover a
tangle of bugs. Deadlines were anathema. If the pressure to deliver
ever got too intense, a coder needed only to speak the word “burnout”
to buy a few months.
From the beginning, I had the sense that there was something
wrongheaded in all this. Was what we did really so precious? How long
could the boom last? In my teens, I had done a little Web design, and,
at the time, that work had been in demand and highly esteemed. You
could earn thousands of dollars for a project that took a weekend. But
along came tools like Squarespace, which allowed pizzeria owners and
freelance artists to make their own Web sites just by clicking around.
For professional coders, a tranche of high-paying, relatively
low-effort work disappeared.
[26]“I should have known he has absolutely no morals—Ive seen how he
loads a dishwasher.”
“I should have known he has absolutely no morals—Ive seen how he loads
a dishwasher.”
Cartoon by Hartley Lin
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The response from the programmer community to these developments was
just, Yeah, you have to keep levelling up your skills. Learn difficult,
obscure things. Software engineers, as a species, love automation.
Inevitably, the best of them build tools that make other kinds of work
obsolete. This very instinct explained why we were so well taken care
of: code had immense leverage. One piece of software could affect the
work of millions of people. Naturally, this sometimes displaced
programmers themselves. We were to think of these advances as a tide
coming in, nipping at our bare feet. So long as we kept learning we
would stay dry. Sound advice—until theres a tsunami.
When we were first allowed to use A.I. chatbots at work, for
programming assistance, I studiously avoided them. I expected that my
colleagues would, too. But soon I started seeing the telltale colors of
an A.I. chat session—the zebra pattern of call-and-response—on
programmers screens as I walked to my desk. A common refrain was that
these tools made you more productive; in some cases, they helped you
solve problems ten times faster.
I wasnt sure I wanted that. I enjoy the act of programming and I like
to feel useful. The tools Im familiar with, like the text editor I use
to format and to browse code, serve both ends. They enhance my practice
of the craft—and, though they allow me to deliver work faster, I still
feel that I deserve the credit. But A.I., as it was being described,
seemed different. It provided a lot of help. I worried that it would
rob me of both the joy of working on puzzles and the satisfaction of
being the one who solved them. I could be infinitely productive, and
all Id have to show for it would be the products themselves.
The actual work product of most programmers is rarely exciting. In
fact, it tends to be almost comically humdrum. A few months ago, I came
home from the office and told my wife about what a great day Id had
wrestling a particularly fun problem. I was working on a program that
generated a table, and someone had wanted to add a header that spanned
more than one column—something that the custom layout engine wed
written didnt support. The work was urgent: these tables were being
used in important documents, wanted by important people. So I
sequestered myself in a room for the better part of the afternoon.
There were lots of lovely sub-problems: How should I allow users of the
layout engine to convey that they want a column-spanning header? What
should their code look like? And there were fiddly details that, if
ignored, would cause bugs. For instance, what if one of the columns
that the header was supposed to span got dropped because it didnt have
any data? I knew it was a good day because I had to pull out pen and
pad—I was drawing out possible scenarios, checking and double-checking
my logic.
But taking a birds-eye view of what happened that day? A table got a
new header. Its hard to imagine anything more mundane. For me, the
pleasure was entirely in the process, not the product. And what would
become of the process if it required nothing more than a three-minute
ChatGPT session? Yes, our jobs as programmers involve many things
besides literally writing code, such as coaching junior hires and
designing systems at a high level. But coding has always been the root
of it. Throughout my career, I have been interviewed and selected
precisely for my ability to solve fiddly little programming puzzles.
Suddenly, this ability was less important.
I had gathered as much from Ben, who kept telling me about the
spectacular successes hed been having with GPT-4. It turned out that
it was not only good at the fiddly stuff but also had the qualities of
a senior engineer: from a deep well of knowledge, it could suggest ways
of approaching a problem. For one project, Ben had wired a small
speaker and a red L.E.D. light bulb into the frame of a portrait of
King Charles, the light standing in for the gem in his crown; the idea
was that when you entered a message on an accompanying Web site the
speaker would play a tune and the light would flash out the message in
Morse code. (This was a gift for an eccentric British expat.)
Programming the device to fetch new messages eluded Ben; it seemed to
require specialized knowledge not just of the microcontroller he was
using but of Firebase, the back-end server technology that stored the
messages. Ben asked me for advice, and I mumbled a few possibilities;
in truth, I wasnt sure that what he wanted would be possible. Then he
asked GPT-4. It told Ben that Firebase had a capability that would make
the project much simpler. Here it was—and here was some code to use
that would be compatible with the microcontroller.
Afraid to use GPT-4 myself—and feeling somewhat unclean about the
prospect of paying OpenAI twenty dollars a month for it—I nonetheless
started probing its capabilities, via Ben. Wed sit down to work on our
crossword project, and Id say, “Why dont you try prompting it this
way?” Hed offer me the keyboard. “No, you drive,” Id say. Together,
we developed a sense of what the A.I. could do. Ben, who had more
experience with it than I did, seemed able to get more out of it in a
stroke. As he later put it, his own neural network had begun to align
with GPT-4s. I would have said that he had achieved mechanical
sympathy. Once, in a feat I found particularly astonishing, he had the
A.I. build him a Snake game, like the one on old Nokia phones. But
then, after a brief exchange with GPT-4, he got it to modify the game
so that when you lost it would show you how far you strayed from the
most efficient route. It took the bot about ten seconds to achieve
this. It was a task that, frankly, I was not sure I could do myself.
In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a players
only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams,
known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the
best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way
of chess. But the centaurs have arrived. GPT-4 on its own is, for the
moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus
GPT-4 is a dangerous thing.
It wasnt long before I caved. I was making a little search tool at
work and wanted to highlight the parts of the users query that matched
the results. But I was splitting up the query by words in a way that
made things much more complicated. I found myself short on patience. I
started thinking about GPT-4. Perhaps instead of spending an afternoon
programming I could spend some time “prompting,” or having a
conversation with an A.I.
In a 1978 essay titled “On the Foolishness of Natural Language
Programming, ” the computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra argued that
if you were to instruct computers not in a specialized language like
C++ or Python but in your native tongue youd be rejecting the very
precision that made computers useful. Formal programming languages, he
wrote, are “an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of
nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to
avoid.” Dijkstras argument became a truism in programming circles.
When the essay made the rounds on Reddit in 2014, a top commenter
wrote, “Im not sure which of the following is scariest. Just how
trivially obvious this idea is” or the fact that “many still do not
know it.”
When I first used GPT-4, I could see what Dijkstra was talking about.
You cant just say to the A.I., “Solve my problem.” That day may come,
but for now it is more like an instrument you must learn to play. You
have to specify what you want carefully, as though talking to a
beginner. In the search-highlighting problem, I found myself asking
GPT-4 to do too much at once, watching it fail, and then starting over.
Each time, my prompts became less ambitious. By the end of the
conversation, I wasnt talking about search or highlighting; I had
broken the problem into specific, abstract, unambiguous sub-problems
that, together, would give me what I wanted.
Having found the A.I.s level, I felt almost instantly that my working
life had been transformed. Everywhere I looked I could see GPT-4-size
holes; I understood, finally, why the screens around the office were
always filled with chat sessions—and how Ben had become so productive.
I opened myself up to trying it more often.
I returned to the crossword project. Our puzzle generator printed its
output in an ugly text format, with lines like
"s""c""a""r""*""k""u""n""i""s""*" "a""r""e""a". I wanted to turn output
like that into a pretty Web page that allowed me to explore the words
in the grid, showing scoring information at a glance. But I knew the
task would be tricky: each letter had to be tagged with the words it
belonged to, both the across and the down. This was a detailed problem,
one that could easily consume the better part of an evening. With the
baby on the way, I was short on free evenings. So I began a
conversation with GPT-4. Some back-and-forth was required; at one
point, I had to read a few lines of code myself to understand what it
was doing. But I did little of the kind of thinking I once believed to
be constitutive of coding. I didnt think about numbers, patterns, or
loops; I didnt use my mind to simulate the activity of the computer.
As another coder, Geoffrey Litt, wrote after a similar experience, “I
never engaged my detailed programmer brain.” So what did I do?
Perhaps what pushed Lee Sedol to retire from the game of Go was the
sense that the game had been forever cheapened. When I got into
programming, it was because computers felt like a form of magic. The
machine gave you powers but required you to study its arcane secrets—to
learn a spell language. This took a particular cast of mind. I felt
selected. I devoted myself to tedium, to careful thinking, and to the
accumulation of obscure knowledge. Then, one day, it became possible to
achieve many of the same ends without the thinking and without the
knowledge. Looked at in a certain light, this can make quite a lot of
ones working life seem like a waste of time.
But whenever I think about Sedol I think about chess. After machines
conquered that game, some thirty years ago, the fear was that there
would be no reason to play it anymore. Yet chess has never been more
popular—A.I. has enlivened the game. A friend of mine picked it up
recently. At all hours, he has access to an A.I. coach that can feed
him chess problems just at the edge of his ability and can tell him,
after hes lost a game, exactly where he went wrong. Meanwhile, at the
highest levels, grandmasters study moves the computer proposes as if
reading tablets from the gods. Learning chess has never been easier;
studying its deepest secrets has never been more exciting.
Computing is not yet overcome. GPT-4 is impressive, but a layperson
cant wield it the way a programmer can. I still feel secure in my
profession. In fact, I feel somewhat more secure than before. As
software gets easier to make, itll proliferate; programmers will be
tasked with its design, its configuration, and its maintenance. And
though Ive always found the fiddly parts of programming the most
calming, and the most essential, Im not especially good at them. Ive
failed many classic coding interview tests of the kind you find at Big
Tech companies. The thing Im relatively good at is knowing whats
worth building, what users like, how to communicate both technically
and humanely. A friend of mine has called this A.I. moment “the revenge
of the so-so programmer.” As coding per se begins to matter less, maybe
softer skills will shine.
That still leaves open the matter of what to teach my unborn child. I
suspect that, as my child comes of age, we will think of “the
programmer” the way we now look back on “the computer,” when that
phrase referred to a person who did calculations by hand. Programming
by typing C++ or Python yourself might eventually seem as ridiculous as
issuing instructions in binary onto a punch card. Dijkstra would be
appalled, but getting computers to do precisely what you want might
become a matter of asking politely.
So maybe the thing to teach isnt a skill but a spirit. I sometimes
think of what I might have been doing had I been born in a different
time. The coders of the agrarian days probably futzed with waterwheels
and crop varietals; in the Newtonian era, they might have been obsessed
with glass, and dyes, and timekeeping. I was reading an oral history of
neural networks recently, and it struck me how many of the people
interviewed—people born in and around the nineteen-thirties—had played
with radios when they were little. Maybe the next cohort will spend
their late nights in the guts of the A.I.s their parents once regarded
as black boxes. I shouldnt worry that the era of coding is winding
down. Hacking is forever. ♦
Published in the print edition of the [27]November 20, 2023, issue,
with the headline “Begin End.”
More Science and Technology
* Can we [28]stop runaway A.I.?
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* There are ways of controlling A.I.—but first we [30]need to stop
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* A security camera [31]for the entire planet.
* Whats the point of [32]reading writing by humans?
* A heat shield for [33]the most important ice on Earth.
* The climate solutions [34]we cant live without.
[35]Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from
The New Yorker.
[36]James Somers is a writer and a programmer based in New York.
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[49]The New Yorker
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