Writing code is so over

There’s an old joke about the weather in San Francisco: If you don’t like it, just walk three blocks. Or maybe it’s wait fifteen minutes. Either way works. The weather in San Francisco is weird.

There’s a similar old joke about web frameworks: If you don’t like the one everyone is using now, just wait 24 hours—a new one will be along. And that wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

I know I harp on how old I am and how long I’ve been around, but that’s only because I am old and I’ve been around. I started on the Internet in 1993, when the web was not much more than a collection of linked documents. 

My first web page (tragically unavailable in the Wayback Machine) was literally a single, large, sprawling index.html file at the root of my directory. I thought I was super cool because I had these thin, wide, rainbow GIF files that separated the sections of my page, divided into Hobbies, Favorite Movies, and, of course, the Under Construction section. And let’s not forget the blinking text!

Coding yesterday

Then JavaScript and CSS came along, and we were off to the races. The early days of writing JavaScript were kind of like knitting with oven mitts on. It wasn’t until jQuery came along that at least some semblance of order came to web development. jQuery gave you a modicum of control over the browser’s Document Object Model (DOM). But of course every browser had a slightly different way of dealing with the DOM. 

jQuery made the UI easy, but creating applications and structuring modules and all that software engineering stuff was challenging. Pretty soon everyone was releasing a JavaScript framework for web development. There was Backbone, Knockout, Meteor, Ember, and AngularJS. Those were just the ones that gained a following. Believe me, there were a million of them. (There are still plenty.)

Eventually, everything settled down, and pretty soon we were all React developers. Except for the Angular and Vue, and Svelte developers. And then we realized that single page applications (SPAs) weren’t really all that great and that most of what we were doing on the web was posting blogs and other documents and here we are back to the beginning again.

All this is a rather long way of saying that web development is weird and hard and strange and full of interesting problems that need to be solved.

And that brings me to my main point. We really don’t have to care about any of it anymore. 

Coding today

Back in March, about a million years ago in AI time (which goes even faster than Internet time), I wrote about the newfangled “vibe coding,” which we pretty much now just call “coding.” Or, actually, it’s not coding anymore, it’s just software development. 

You see, I vibe-coded a web page for a little side project that I have going, and it works. It has authentication and logging and tracks API keys and state and all the stuff the website is supposed to do. I insisted that Claude Code code the site using my current framework of choice, Astro. The code is actually pretty good, and the results after a mere week or so were nothing short of astonishing. 

At some point it hit me that I had done the whole thing without writing a single line of code. In fact, I quit looking at the code after a while. Then I stopped even caring whether Claude was doing things the Astro way. 

That’s not entirely fair. I did tell Claude to create interfaces for logging and authentication so that I could switch out the implementations as needed or desired. That’s good practice—code against interfaces and not implementations, right? 

And then I realized that it is just a matter of time before Claude figures out that it should code against interfaces without even being told to do so. Because that is the right thing to do.

Coding tomorrow

This must be how assembly developers felt when compilers came along. They knew how to write clean, compact, well-structured assembly. The early compilers probably did things crudely and inefficiently, but it wasn’t long before compilers could optimize and perform clever tricks to make assembly instructions just as good—shoot, better!—than any human could. And now no one writes assembly anymore.  Well, almost no one. 

What I’m trying to get at is this: writing code is so over. In short order, AI agents will be writing better, cleaner code than any human can, just like compilers can write better assembly than we mere humans. Web frameworks? What difference does it make? The resulting web application will work and do what you want, and you won’t care that it uses React and TypeScript. 

Or, put another way, in about a week we’ll all be using the same programming language: English.