The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems.

Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did.

And software that’s open and can be modified.

Instead what we have is:

- AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to fully reason.

- perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”.

- hardware that is completely undocumented to all but a small few who are granted an NDA before hand

- operating systems that are trying harder and harder to prevent us from running any software they haven’t approved because “security”

- and distributed systems become centralised, such as GitHub, CloudFlare, AWS, and so on and so forth.

The only thing special about right now is that we have added yet another abstraction on top of an already overly complex software stack to allow us to use natural language as pseudocode. And that is a version special breakthrough, but it’s not enough by itself to overlook all the other problems with modern computing.

In some ways, I'd say we're in a software dark age. In 40 years, we'll still have C, bash, grep, and Mario ROMs, but practically none of the software written today will still be around. That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model. But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies. There's no way you'll be able to take a repo from 2026 and spin it up in 2050 without major work.

One question is how will AI factor in to this. Will it completely remove the problem? Will local models be capable of finding or fixing every dependency in your 20yo project? Or will they exacerbate things by writing terrible code with black hole dependency trees? We're gonna find out.

One thing that I realized was that a lot of our so-called "craft" is converged "know-how". Take the recent news that Anthropic used Claude Code to write a C compiler for example, writing compiler is hard (and fun) for us humans because we indeed need to spend years understanding deeply the compiler theory and learning every minute detail of implementation. That kind of learning is not easily transferrable. Most students tried the compiler class and then never learned enough, only a handful few every year continued to grow into true compiler engineers. Yet to our AI models, it does not matter much. They already learned the well-established patterns of compiler writing from the excellent open-source implementations, and now they can churn out millions of code easily. If not perfect, they will get better in the future.

So, in a sense our "craft" no longer matters, but what really happens is that the repetitive know-how has become commoditized. We still need people to do creative work, but what is not clear is how many such people we will need. After all, at least in short term, most people build their career by perfecting procedural work because transferring the know-how and the underlying whys is very expensive to human. For the long term, though, I'm optimistic that engineers just get an amazing tool and will use it create more opportunities that demand more people.

We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary.

Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.

Glad to see this already expressed here because I wholly agree. Programming has not brought me this much joy in decades. What a wonderful time to be alive.

Good for you. But there are already so, so many posts and threads celebrating all of this. Everyone is different. Some of us enjoy the activity of programming by hand. This thread is for those us, to mourn.

Nothing meaningful happened in almost 20 years. After the iPhone, what happened that truly changed our lives? The dumpster fire of social media? Background Netflix TV?

In fact, I remember when I could actually shop on Amazon or browse for restaurants on Yelp while trusting the reviews. None of that is possible today.

We have been going through a decade of enshitification.

> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all.

We could easily approach a state of affairs where most of what you see online is AI and almost every "person" you interact with is fake. It's hard to see how someone who supposedly remembers computing in the 80s, when the power of USENET and BBSs to facilitate long-distance, or even international, communication and foster personal relationships (often IRL) was enthralling, not thinking we've lost something.

I agree with you with the caveat that all the "ease of building" benefits, for me, could potentially be dwarfed by job losses and pay decreases. If SWE really becomes obsolete, or even if the number of roles decrease a lot and/or the pay decreases a lot (or even fails to increase with inflation), I am suddenly in the unenviable position of not being financially secure and being stuck in my 30s with an increasingly useless degree. A life disaster, in other words. In that scenario the unhappiness of worrying about money and retraining far outweighs the happiness I get from being able to build stuff really fast.

Fundamentally this is the only point I really have on the 'anti-AI' side, but it's a really important one.

We definitely have lost something. I got into computers because they're deterministic. Way less complicated than people.

Now the determinism is gone and computers are gaining the worst qualities of people.

My only sanctuary in life is slipping away from me. And I have to hear people tell me I'm wrong who aren't even sympathetic to how this affects me.

> We're on the precipice of something incredible.

Total dependence on a service?

I really am very thankful for @simonw posting a TikTok from Chris Ashworth, a Baltimore theater software developer, who recently picked up LLM's for building a voxel display software controller. And who was just blown away. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/a-programming-tool-for...

Simon doesn't touch on my favorite part of Chris's video though, which is Chris citing his friend Jesse Kriss. This stuck out at me so hard, and is so close to what you are talking about:

> The interesting thing about this is that it's not taking away something that was human and making it a robot. We've been forced to talk to computers in computer language. And this is turning that around.

I don't see (as you say) a personality. But I do see the ability to talk. The esoteria is still here underneath, but computer programmers having this lock on the thing that has eaten the world, being the only machine whisperers around, is over. That depth of knowledge is still there and not going away! But notably too, the LLM will help you wade in, help those not of the esoteric personhood of programmers to dive in & explore.

> golden age of computing

I feel like we've reached the worst age of computing. Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage.

The same company that develops our browsers and our web standards is also actively destroying the internet with AI scrapers. Hobbyists lost the internet to companies and all software got worse for it.

Our most popular desktop operating system doesn't even have an easy way to package and update software for it.

I didn't imagine I would be sending all my source code directly to a corporation for access to an irritatingly chipper personality that is confidently incorrect the way these things are.

There have been wild technological developments but we've lost privacy and autonomy across basically all devices (excepting the people who deliberately choose to forego the most capable devices, and even then there are firmware blobs). We've got the facial recognition and tracking so many sci-fi dystopias have warned us to avoid.

I'm having an easier time accomplishing more difficult technological tasks. But I lament what we have come to. I don't think we are in the Star Trek future and I imagined doing more drugs in a Neuromancer future. It's like a Snow Crash / 1984 corporate government collab out here, it kinda sucks.

I retired a few years ago, so I have no idea what AI programming is.

But I mourned when CRT came out, I had just started programming. But I quickly learned CRTs were far better,

I mourned when we moved to GUIs, I never liked the move and still do not like dealing with GUIs, but I got used to it.

Went through all kinds of programming methods, too many to remember, but those were easy to ignore and workaround. I view this new AI thing in a similar way. I expect it will blow over and a new bright shiny programming methodology will become a thing to stress over. In the long run, I doubt anything will really change.

Same.

I was born in 84 and have been doing software since 97

it’s never been easier, better or more accessible time to make literally anything - by far.

Also if you prefer to code by hand literally nobody is stopping you AND even that is easier.

Cause if you wanted to code for console games you literally couldn’t in the 90s without 100k specialized dev machine.

It’s not even close.

This “I’m a victim because my software engineering hobby isn’t profitable anymore” take is honestly baffling.

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