Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

[Zorro]

In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.

Lately, Manu Ebert has been trying to keep his A.I. from humiliating him.

I recently visited Ebert, a machine-learning engineer and former neuroscientist, at the spare apartment where he and Conor Brennan-Burke run their start-up, Hyperspell. Ebert, a tall and short-bearded 39-year-old with the air of a European academic, sat before a mammoth curved monitor. Onscreen, Claude Code — the A.I. tool from Anthropic — was busy at work. One of its agents was writing a new feature and another was testing it; a third supervised everything, like a virtual taskmaster. After a few minutes, Claude flashed: “Implementation complete!”

Ebert grew up in the ’90s, learning to code the old-fashioned way: He typed it out, line by painstaking line. After college, he held jobs as a software developer in Silicon Valley for companies like Airbnb before becoming a co-founder of four start-ups. Back then, developing software meant spending days hunched over his keyboard, pondering gnarly details, trying to avoid mistakes.

All that ended last fall. A.I. had become so good at writing code that Ebert, initially cautious, began letting it do more and more. Now Claude Code does the bulk of it. The agents are so fast — and generally so accurate — that when a customer recently needed Hyperspell to write some new code, it took only half an hour. In the before times? “That alone would have taken me a day,” he said.

He and Brennan-Burke, who is 32, are still software developers, but like most of their peers now, they only rarely write code. Instead, they spend their days talking to the A.I., describing in plain English what they want from it and responding to the A.I.’s “plan” for what it will do. Then they turn the agents loose.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-programming-jobs-claude-chatgpt.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SlA.mkEt.3YH37wLlokrE&smid=url-share

[dalton99a]

1. Great article.

[OC375]

2. Still have to know how to code

Should be the title. There's no free lunch, only shortcuts which, if you don't know what you are doing, lead to dead ends.