There’s a lot of worry right now in the software development industry. There’s layoffs, AI is vying for all of our jobs, markets are unstable and there’s no telling where the industry, let alone the world is going to look like over the next 10 to 20 years. Things are changing, and change is always unsettling. During moments like these, sometimes a look backward into how we got here, can offer insight into where things are going.

I sit here, on a sunny spring day, the last day of my paternity leave, pondering the question of will I see a day where I can’t support my brand new family doing a thing that I love, programming. If you listen to tech twitter, I’m already obsolete. A dying breed. I don’t vibe code all day. I don’t just give in and let the LLM cook while burning thousands of dollars in tokens. I’m not herding my band of agentic junior devs to the promised land of profitability. I care about the details in how software is written, and I enjoy the process of banging out code on a keyboard. It’s meditative. Flow state is even addictive. I don’t want to give that up to a soulless machine.

While on leave I had a few small goals, and one of them was to finish a book, and I decided to pick up We Programmers by Robert C. Martin (aka. Uncle Bob) and read a little bit about computing history. I’ve always been interested in what predates my (relatively) young perspective into computing. I got my start on a Windows 98 machine playing old DOS games and aggravating my parents as I couldn’t comprehend the concept of shutting down a machine vs just hitting the power button. I would inevitably corrupt the install, and someone more qualified than I would have to spend their day rebuilding the OS on the machine. Since my start, I’d always been fascinated by stories of the before. My Dad who was in college during a portion of these times, regaled a young me with stories of getting the mainframe to talk to the Macintosh, and then the Macintosh to talk to the PC to get remote sensing data from one place to the other. I always wondered what working in those sorts of mainframe environments were like. This book gave me exactly the insights I was looking for and much more. It starts with some of the earliest forms of computing with Babbage and Lovelace, and works its way all the way up to the point where Uncle Bob’s own career started and it talks through possible permutations of the future.

Walking through time, reading about how looping in programs actually started by physically looping paper tape, is mind boggling. Likewise the idea that these early machines broke often and produced erroneous results requiring debugging of the physical hardware and not just the software is also very humbling. In our modern age, we often don’t even think about bits being flipped here and there, most of the time data arrives where it’s supposed to, complete and uncorrupted in milliseconds. Early programs had to be optimized for the rotation of drum memory, saving data in tubes of mercury (sounds like black magic to me). All these things give me a bit more appreciation for the machine I use on a daily basis.

One of the most remarkable takeaways to me though, is a thought that surfaces time and time again in my life, and a comfort in these turbulent times: there is nothing new under the sun. Machine architectures change, hardware gets better, software gets easier to write, and even through all this turmoil, someone still has to give machines directives. The more specific those directives the better. I think Uncle Bob puts it best when he calls programmers “Detail Managers.” Even when you’re giving instructions to an LLM, if you want things to be a certain way you need to be hyper specific and even then, if you’re too specific the LLM seems to get confused and starts ignoring your directives and doing what it wants to instead. It’s not thinking. It’s not asking questions and making measured decisions based on the needs of users, it’s just spitting out the path that most others have already tread. It’s the average of all that came before and it can’t come up with anything new, only mash old ideas together in potentially novel ways, and often those novel ways aren’t even its doing, but the creative thinking of the prompter.

I think that after reading this book, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that We Programmers aren’t going anywhere any time soon. We just have a new tool in our tool belt. If anything, the acceleration in writing of software will just necessitate more creative minds dealing with the never ending problems and features that institutions will have and need. It will ultimately lead to more work, not less, and that’s exactly where you want to be. In an industry that’s undergoing growth.

But even if I’m wrong and I end up becoming a chicken farmer to make ends meet, I don’t think I’ll give up programming. It’s a life long love and addiction, and I don’t think I’m alone in that sentiment. I think many people, which some of the best examples are in this book, will keep coding for the sheer love of it. It’s too late. I’ve found what I love to do. I’m hooked. I’m a programmer.