lawz blog

Aug 4, 2024

You're coding in English now

I came across an interesting exchange between Paul Graham and Amjad Masad. Amjad was showing him new AI features in a Replit product and Paul made a comment about a bunch of boilerplate code that had been generated. Amjad placed a hand on his shoulder and said, "Don't worry about that, you're coding in English now."

This is increasingly true. I find myself caring less and less about the code unless I absolutely have to. I'm not a coder, I'm a programmer. If the program runs consistently and does what I want, that's all I care about. And that's definitely all your users care about. Sure I know whats going on in the code, but more and more of it is just a translation from English.

Some people see this as a bad thing. I like to see the positive side. The ability to code will no longer be a barrier to software creation. The only limitation will be the creativity of the developers and their ability to distribute it. I can't wait to see what people create.