Grace Hopper’s Revenge – by Greg Olsen
March 18, 2026
The world of software has lots of rules and laws. One of the most hilarious is Kernighan’s Law:
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
In the past, humans have written, read, and debugged the code.
Now LLMs write code, humans read and debug. (And LLMs write voluminous mediocre code in verbose languages.)
Humans will do less and less. LLMs will write code, debug, and manage edge cases. LLMs will verify against human specifications, human audits, human requirements. And humans will only intervene when things are misaligned. Which they can see because they have easy verification mechanisms.
This essay by Greg Olson from late last year considers the impact of large language models on software engineering, And in particular, the programming languages that work best with large language models.
I wonder how much longer we’re going to be particularly concerned with questions like that. And when we’ll start seeing the emergence of programming languages and patterns and paradigms that are LLM first.
