This unique moment in the history of software developers is creating two groups of people that I, well, feel sorry for.
Too late to code
The first group is the software developers of the future who will take agentic development for granted. They will never have written a line of code. For them, software development will be nothing but agent-based. They will never have battled recalcitrant code, created an elegant class structure, or written a tight-running algorithm. They will never have fought the debugger or struggled to figure out why something doesn’t work. They will never have worked for weeks on a small but crucial feature. They will never have cranked out awesome code while in a flow state.
As a result, they will not feel the profound thrill of watching Claude Code do in 10 minutes what we mortals would have struggled to do in 10 days. Slowly but surely, we former code jockeys will retire, taking with us the legacy of actually writing code and of the early, heady days we are living through now, when suddenly—and irreversibly—we don’t have to write code anymore. For the next generation of developers, Claude Code will be the norm and not the incredible new thing.
