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

March 13, 2026

Coders After Coding (archive link) is a fascinating article by Clive Thompson about the current state of coding and AI.

I got a link to this from Mark, and it’s been a fascinating read.

Mark and I have a weekly get-together for coffee. We talk about neighborhood and house stuff, but a lot of our conversations lately have revolved around AI. Namely – the way it’s changing the tech world, and how/when we think it will change things for the rest of the (non-coding) world.

I’ve heard this before, but it’s still stunning to me: the fact that the coders at Anthropic (who are developing Claude) are actually not doing the coding themselves, but rather using Claude to write the code.

Today he [Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code] simply pulls out his phone and dictates to Claude what he wants the A.I. agent to do; in a sort of Ouroboric loop, 100 percent of Cherny’s contributions to the Claude codebase are now written entirely by Claude.

While we talked, his phone was sitting on the table in front of us, and at the end of an hour he showed me the screen: 10 Claude agents had been tweaking the codebase. “I haven’t written a single line by hand, and I’m like the most prolific coder on the team,” he said. “It’s an alien intelligence that we’re learning to work with.”

There’s so much quotable stuff from this article, it’s difficult to hold back. Very much worth a read.

There was one snippet though, that I really have to mention. It was a quotation from Anil Dash (whose name I haven’t heard in an age and a day). It resonated tremendously with me though, and I wanted to share:

“The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see L.L.M.s differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, L.L.M.s take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” Dash says. “And in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.”

This perspective from Dash has been sitting with me for quite a while. It’s quite something.

I don’t know where things are going, but it feels exciting to me. I’m biased because I’m part of a technical world that has embraced AI, and I can see the impact of it on a near daily basis.

Right now feels akin to the time right before Google existed. It feels like that era after email was available to college students (Pine, FTW)… but before email was available to the masses (AOL).

It feels like the world has been making furniture with hand tools like saws and chisels, and suddenly… cordless power tools started to appear out of nowhere. Are we going to hurt and injure ourselves? Absolutely. But I think we’re also going to be building some pretty incredible things, as we learn to not hurt ourselves.

AI compelling read

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