The End of Programming as We Know It – O’Reilly
February 12, 2025
There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it.It is not the end of programming. It is the end of programming as we know it today. That is not new. The first programmers connected physical circuits to perform each calculation. They were succeeded by programmers writing machine instructions as binary code to be input one bit at a time by flipping switches on the front of a computer. Assembly language programming then put an end to that. It lets a programmer use a human-like language to tell the computer to move data to locations in memory and perform calculations on it. Then, development of even higher-level compiled languages like Fortran, COBOL, and their successors C, C++, and Java meant that most programmers no longer wrote assembly code. Instead, they could express their wishes to the computer using higher level abstractions.
There is clearly something in the air–Tim O’Reilly, one of the giants of the technology industry (founder of O’Reilly publishing, semi-finer of the term Web 2.0, spotter of deep technology trends) has penned this long thoughtful essay on the question that has been front of my mind for some time now ‘what is the nature of software engineering when LLMs can increasingly do a lot of the work software engineers have done’.
I think anyone who writes software should read this.
