I remember the first time I wrote a line of code that worked. The feeling was electric, like discovering a secret passage in a familiar house. I was young, and programming felt like magic. Each library was a bridge, built by someone I would never meet, yet whose intentions I could sense in the curve of their logic. I trusted these invisible hands, these engineers who came before, to lift me higher on the ladder of abstraction. We stood on each other’s shoulders, reaching for something just out of sight.
Programming is so damn romantic. It is a love letter to the future, written in a language only a few can read. When I contribute to open-source projects, I feel the weight of intergenerational knowledge. I am not just solving a problem; I am advancing our species, one commit at a time. Sometimes, I descend down to the bits, tracing the path my predecessors carved through silicon and copper. I can almost feel their presence, guiding my hands. This is a young field. Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Dennis Ritchie, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds... the legends are not distant myths but living memories, or at least, only a generation away.
But now, as AI sweeps across the landscape, I sense the beginning of an end to the golden age of manual programming. The machines are learning to build their own bridges, and the need to descend to the bits is fading into obscurity. Soon, tracing the raw pathways of silicon and code will become an arcane craft, practiced by only a few. Fewer and fewer of us will remember what it felt like to shape the medium with our own hands. I want to write this as a reminder to my future self: once, programming was art.
When GPT-3 first appeared, I asked it a question, half in jest: “How do I win this game?” It replied, “The only way to win is not to play.” At first, I laughed. But the more I pondered, the deeper the answer became. We are caught in too many zero-sum games—racing to be faster, cheaper, more efficient. We compete to automate ourselves out of relevance. But what if the real victory is to step outside the game? To refuse to play by rules that no longer serve us?
AI forces us to confront this choice. If you are an artist afraid of AI taking your job, perhaps you are not truly making art. You are doing a job. Seth Godin made the difference vivid in a talk:
When it’s your job, you want to do less of it. When it’s art, you want to do more of it.
That was before AI, but now the truth is even sharper. Your boss or client wants to replace you with AI, because they see your work as a job, not as art. Capitalism rewards efficiency, not beauty. Any job, including mine, will eventually be replaced. The only way to find harmony with AI is to practice the art of co-creation with AI.
So here we are, at the edge of something new. We may be the last generation of programmers who write code by hand, who feel the romance of the craft. But we can also be the first generation of artists who use these new tools to create something only humans can imagine. The way forward is not to cling to the old games, but to approach our work as artists, with our strongest intention and love. With AI as our symbiotic partner, we are returning to programming as art, but in a form never seen before.
This is the New Renaissance.
Let us be the last of the programmers, and the first of the artists.