21/02/2025, 07:33 The End of Programming as We Know It – O’Reilly

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Radar / Programming

The End of
Programming as We
Know It

By Tim O’Reilly

February 4, 2025

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Data programming (source: Pixabay)

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There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose
their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it. SIGN IN Try Now

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.

Betty Jean Jennings and Frances Bilas (right) program the ENIAC in 1946. Via the Computer History Museum

Eventually, interpreted languages, which are much easier to debug, became the
norm.

BASIC, one of the first of these to hit the big time, was at first seen as a toy,
but soon proved to be the wave of the future. Programming became accessible
to kids and garage entrepreneurs, not just the back office priesthood at large
companies and government agencies.

Consumer operating systems were also a big part of the story. In the early days
of the personal computer, every computer manufacturer needed software
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engineers who could write low-level drivers that performed the work of
reading and writing to memory boards, hard disks, and peripherals
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modems and printers. Windows put an end to that. It didn’t just succeed
because it provided a graphical user interface that made it far easier for
untrained individuals to use computers. It also provided what Marc Andreessen,
whose company Netscape was about to be steamrollered by Microsoft,
dismissively (and wrongly) called “just a bag of drivers.” That bag of drivers,
fronted by the Win32 APIs, meant that programmers no longer needed to write
low-level code to control the machine. That job was effectively encapsulated in
the operating system. Windows and macOS, and for mobile, iOS and Android,
mean that today, most programmers no longer need to know much of what
earlier generations of programmers knew.

There were more programmers, not fewer

This was far from the end of programming, though. There were more
programmers than ever. Users in the hundreds of millions consumed the fruits
of their creativity. In a classic demonstration of elasticity of demand, as
software was easier to create, its price fell, allowing developers to create
solutions that more people were willing to pay for.

The web was another “end of programming.” Suddenly, the user interface was
made up of human-readable documents, shown in a browser with links that
could in turn call programs on remote servers. Anyone could build a simple
“application” with minimal programming skill. “No code” became a buzzword.
Soon enough, everyone needed a website. Tools like WordPress made it
possible for nonprogrammers to create those websites without coding. Yet as
the technology grew in capability, successful websites became more and more
complex. There was an increasing separation between “frontend” and
“backend” programming. New interpreted programming languages like Python
and JavaScript became dominant. Mobile devices added a new, ubiquitous front
end, requiring new skills. And once again, the complexity was hidden behind
frameworks, function libraries, and APIs that insulated programmers from
having to know as much about the low level functionality that it was essential
for them to learn only a few years before.

Big data, web services, and cloud computing established a kind of “internet
operating system.” Services like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Stripe made it
possible to do formerly difficult, high-stakes enterprise tasks like taking
payments with minimal programming expertise. All kinds of deep and powerful
functionality was made available via simple APIs. Yet this explosion of internet
sites and the network protocols and APIs connecting them ended up creating
the need for more programmers.

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Programmers were no longer building static software artifacts updated every

couple of years but continuously developing, integrating, and maintaining
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long-lived services. Even more importantly, much of the work at these vast
services, like Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, Amazon, Facebook, and
Twitter, was automated at vast scale. Programs were designed and built by
humans, not AI, but much of the work itself was done by special-purpose
predecessors to today’s general purpose AIs. The workers that do the bulk of
the heavy lifting at these companies are already programs. The human
programmers are their managers. There are now hundreds of thousands of
programmers doing this kind of supervisory work. They are already living in a
world where the job is creating and managing digital co-workers.

“Google, Facebook, Amazon, or a host of more recent Silicon Valley startups…employ tens of thousands of
workers. If you think with a twentieth century factory mindset, those workers spend their days grinding out
products, just like their industrial forebears, only today, they are producing software rather than physical
goods. If, instead, you step back and view these companies with a 21st century mindset, you realize that a large
part of the work of these companies – delivering search results, news and information, social network status
updates, and relevant products for purchase – is done by software programs and algorithms. These are the real
workers, and the programmers who create them are their managers.”—Tim O’Reilly, “Managing the Bots That
Are Managing the Business,” MIT Sloan Management Review, May 21, 2016

In each of these waves, old skills became obsolescent—still useful but no

longer essential—and new ones became the key to success. There are still a few
programmers who write compilers, thousands who write popular JavaScript
frameworks and Python libraries, but tens of millions who write web and
mobile applications and the backend software that enables them. Billions of
users consume what they produce.

Might this time be different?

Suddenly, though, it is seemingly possible for a nonprogrammer to simply talk

to an LLM or specialized software agent in plain English (or the human
language of your choice) and get back a useful prototype in Python (or the
programming language of your choice). There’s even a new buzzword for this:
CHOP, or “chat-oriented programming.” The rise of advanced reasoning models
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is beginning to demonstrate AI that can generate even complex programs with

a high-level prompt explaining the task to be accomplished. AsSIGN
a result,
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are a lot of people saying “this time is different,” that AI will completely
replace most human programmers, and in fact, most knowledge workers. They
say we face a wave of pervasive human unemployment.

I still don’t buy it. When there’s a breakthrough that puts advanced computing
power into the hands of a far larger group of people, yes, ordinary people can
do things that were once the domain of highly trained specialists. But that
same breakthrough also enables new kinds of services and demand for those
services. It creates new sources of deep magic that only a few understand.

The magic that’s coming now is the most powerful yet. And that means that
we’re beginning a profound period of exploration and creativity, trying to
understand how to make that magic work and to derive new advantages from
its power. Smart developers who adopt the technology will be in demand
because they can do so much more, focusing on the higher-level creativity that
adds value.

Learning by doing

AI will not replace programmers, but it will transform their jobs. Eventually
much of what programmers do today may be as obsolete (for everyone but
embedded system programmers) as the old skill of debugging with an
oscilloscope. Master programmer and prescient tech observer Steve Yegge
observes that it is not junior and mid-level programmers who will be replaced
but those who cling to the past rather than embracing the new programming
tools and paradigms. Those who acquire or invent the new skills will be in high
demand. Junior developers who master the tools of AI will be able to
outperform senior programmers who don’t. Yegge calls it “The Death of the
Stubborn Developer.”

My ideas are shaped not only by my own past 40+ years of experience in the
computer industry and the observations of developers like Yegge but also by
the work of economic historian James Bessen, who studied how the first
Industrial Revolution played out in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts
during the early 1800s. As skilled crafters were replaced by machines operated
by “unskilled” labor, human wages were indeed depressed. But Bessen noticed
something peculiar by comparing the wage records of workers in the new
industrial mills with those of the former home-based crafters. It took just about
as long for an apprentice craftsman to reach the full wages of a skilled
journeyman as it did for one of the new entry-level unskilled factory workers to

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reach full pay and productivity. The workers in both regimes were actually
skilled workers. But they had different kinds of skills. SIGN IN Try Now

There were two big reasons, Bessen found, why wages remained flat or
depressed for most of the first 50 years of the Industrial Revolution before
taking off and leading to a widespread increase of prosperity. The first was that
the factory owners hoarded the benefits of the new productivity rather than
sharing it with workers. But the second was that the largest productivity gains
took decades to arrive because the knowledge of how best to use the new
technology wasn’t yet widely dispersed. It took decades for inventors to make
the machines more robust, for those using them to come up with new kinds of
workflows to make them more effective, to create new kinds of products that
could be made with them, for a wider range of businesses to adopt the new
technologies, and for workers to acquire the necessary skills to take advantage of
them. Workers needed new skills not only to use the machines but to repair
them, to improve them, to invent the future that they implied but had not yet
made fully possible. All of this happens through a process that Bessen calls
“learning by doing.”

It’s not enough for a few individuals to be ahead of the curve in adopting the
new skills. Bessen explains that “what matters to a mill, an industry, and to
society generally is not how long it takes to train an individual worker but what
it takes to create a stable, trained workforce” (Learning by Doing, 36). Today,
every company that is going to be touched by this revolution (which is to say,
every company) needs to put its shoulder to the wheel. We need an AI-literate
workforce. What is programming, after all, but the way that humans get
computers to do our bidding? The fact that “programming” is getting closer
and closer to human language, that our machines can understand us rather than
us having to speak to them in their native tongue of 0s and 1s, or some
specialized programming language pidgin, should be cause for celebration.

People will be creating, using, and refining more programs, and new industries
will be born to manage and build on what we create. Lessons from history tell
us that when automation makes it cheaper and easier to deliver products that
people want or need, increases in demand often lead to increases in
employment. It is only when demand is satisfied that employment begins to
fall. We are far from that point when it comes to programming.

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Satya Nadella
@satyanadella · Follow SIGN IN Try Now

Jevons paradox strikes again! As AI gets more

efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket,
turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough
of.
en.m.wikipedia.org
Jevons paradox - Wikipedia

6:48 AM · Jan 27, 2025

13.2K Reply Copy link
Read 840 replies

Not unsurprisingly, Wharton School professor and AI evangelist Ethan Mollick is

also a fan of Bessen’s work. This is why he argues so compellingly to “always
bring AI to the table,” to involve it in every aspect of your job, and to explore
“the jagged edge” of what works and what doesn’t. It is also why he urges
companies to use AI to empower their workers, not to replace them. There is so
much to learn about how to apply the new technology. Businesses’ best source
of applied R&D is the explorations of the people you have, as they use AI to
solve their problems and seek out new opportunities.

What programming is will change

Sam Schillace, one of the deputy CTOs at Microsoft, agreed with my analysis. In
a recent conversation, he told me, “We’re in the middle of inventing a new
programming paradigm around AI systems. When we went from the desktop
into the internet era, everything in the stack changed, even though all the
levels of the stack were the same. We still have languages, but they went from
compiled to interpreted. We still have teams, but they went from waterfall to
Agile to CI/CD. We still have databases, but they went from ACID to NoSQL. We
went from one user, one app, one thread, to multi distributed, whatever. We’re
doing the same thing with AI right now.”

Here are some of the technologies that are being assembled into a new AI
stack. And this doesn’t even include the plethora of AI models, their APIs, and
their cloud infrastructure. And it’s already out of date!
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“AI Engineering Landscape,” via Marie-Alice Blete on GitHub

But the explosion of new tools, frameworks, and practices is just the beginning
of how programming is changing. One issue, Schillace noted, is that models
don’t have memory the way humans have memory. Even with large context
windows, they struggle to do what he calls “metacognition.” As a result, he
sees the need for humans to still provide a great deal of the context in which
their AI co-developers operate.

Schillace expanded on this idea in a recent post. “Large language models

(LLMs) and other AI systems are attempting to automate thought,” he wrote.
“The parallels to the automation of motion during the industrial revolution are
striking. Today, the automation is still crude: we’re doing the cognitive
equivalent of pumping water and hammering—basic tasks like summarization,
pattern recognition, and text generation. We haven’t yet figured out how to
build robust engines for this new source of energy—we’re not even at the
locomotive stage of AI yet.”

Even the locomotive stage was largely an expansion of the brute force humans
were able to bring to bear when moving physical objects. The essential next
breakthrough was an increase in the means of control over that power. Schillace
asks, “What if traditional software engineering isn’t fully relevant here? What if
building AI requires fundamentally different practices and control systems?
We’re trying to create new kinds of thinking (our analog to motion): higher-
level, metacognitive, adaptive systems that can do more than repeat pre-
designed patterns. To use these effectively, we’ll need to invent entirely new
ways of working, new disciplines. Just as the challenges of early steam power
birthed metallurgy, the challenges of AI will force the emergence of new
sciences of cognition, reliability, and scalability—fields that don’t yet fully
exist.”

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The challenge of deploying AI technologies in business

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Bret Taylor, formerly co-CEO of Salesforce, one-time Chief Technology Officer
at Meta, and long ago, leader of the team that created Google Maps, is now the
CEO of AI agent developer Sierra, a company at the heart of developing and
deploying AI technology in businesses. In a recent conversation, Bret told me
that he believes that a company’s AI agent will become its primary digital
interface, as significant as its website, as significant as its mobile app, perhaps
even more so. A company’s AI agent will have to encode all of its key business
policies and processes. This is something that AI may eventually be able to do
on its own, but today, Sierra has to assign each of its customers an engineering
team to help with the implementation.

“That last mile of taking a cool platform and a bunch of your business processes
and manifesting an agent is actually pretty hard to do,” Bret explained.
“There’s a new role emerging now that we call an agent engineer, a software
developer who looks a little bit like a frontend web developer. That’s an
archetype that’s the most common in software. If you’re a React developer, you
can learn to make AI agents. What a wonderful way to reskill and make your
skills relevant.”

Who will want to wade through a customer service phone tree when they could
be talking to an AI agent that can actually solve their problem? But getting
those agents right is going to be a real challenge. It’s not the programming
that’s so hard. It’s deeply understanding the business processes and thinking
how the new capability can transform them to take advantage of the new
capabilities. An agent that simply reproduces existing business processes will
be as embarrassing as a web page or mobile app that simply recreates a paper
form. (And yes, those do still exist!)

Addy Osmani, the head of user experience for Google Chrome, calls this the
70% problem: “While engineers report being dramatically more productive
with AI, the actual software we use daily doesn’t seem like it’s getting
noticeably better.” He notes that nonprogrammers working with AI code
generation tools can get out a great demo or solve a simple problem, but they
get stuck on the last 30% of a complex program because they don’t know
enough to debug the code and guide the AI to the correct solution. Meanwhile:

When you watch a senior engineer work with AI tools like Cursor or Copilot, it
looks like magic. They can scaffold entire features in minutes, complete with
tests and documentation. But watch carefully, and you’ll notice something
crucial: They’re not just accepting what the AI suggests…. They’re applying
years of hard-won engineering wisdom to shape and constrain the AI’s output.
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The AI is accelerating their implementation, but their expertise is what keeps

the code maintainable. Junior engineers often miss these crucial
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accept the AI’s output more readily, leading to what I call “house of cards code”
– it looks complete but collapses under real-world pressure.

In this regard, Chip Huyen, the author of the new book AI Engineering, made an
illuminating observation in an email to me:

I don’t think AI introduces a new kind of thinking. It reveals what actually

requires thinking.

No matter how manual, if a task can only be done by a handful of those most
educated, that task is considered intellectual. One example is writing, the
physical act of copying words onto paper. In the past, when only a small
portion of the population was literate, writing was considered intellectual.
People even took pride in their calligraphy. Nowadays, the word “writing” no
longer refers to this physical act but the higher abstraction of arranging ideas
into a readable format.

Similarly, once the physical act of coding can be automated, the meaning of
“programming” will change to refer to the act of arranging ideas into executable
programs.

Mehran Sahami, the chair of Stanford’s CS department, put it simply:

“Computer science is about systematic thinking, not writing code.”

When AI agents start talking to agents…

…precision in articulating the problem correctly gets even more important. An

agent as a corporate frontend that provides access to all of a company’s
business processes will be talking not just to consumers but also to agents for
those consumers and agents for other companies.

That entire side of the agent equation is far more speculative. We haven’t yet
begun to build out the standards for cooperation between independent AI
agents! A recent paper on the need for agent infrastructure notes:

Current tools are largely insufficient because they are not designed to shape
how agents interact with existing institutions (e.g., legal and economic
systems) or actors (e.g., digital service providers, humans, other AI agents). For

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example, alignment techniques by nature do not assure counterparties that

some human will be held accountable when a user instructs an agent
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perform an illegal action. To fill this gap, we propose the concept of agent
infrastructure: technical systems and shared protocols external to agents that
are designed to mediate and influence their interactions with and impacts on
their environments. Agent infrastructure comprises both new tools and
reconfigurations or extensions of existing tools. For example, to facilitate
accountability, protocols that tie users to agents could build upon existing
systems for user authentication, such as OpenID. Just as the Internet relies on
infrastructure like HTTPS, we argue that agent infrastructure will be similarly
indispensable to ecosystems of agents. We identify three functions for agent
infrastructure: 1) attributing actions, properties, and other information to
specific agents, their users, or other actors; 2) shaping agents’ interactions; and
3) detecting and remedying harmful actions from agents.

There are huge coordination and design problems to be solved here. Even the
best AI agents we can imagine will not solve complex coordination problems
like this without human direction. There is enough programming needed here
to keep even AI-assisted programmers busy for at least the next decade.

In short, there is a whole world of new software to be invented, and it won’t be

invented by AI alone but by human programmers using AI as a superpower. And
those programmers need to acquire a lot of new skills.

We are in the early days of inventing the future

There is so much new to learn and do. So yes, let’s be bold and assume that AI
codevelopers make programmers ten times as productive. (Your mileage may
vary, depending on how eager your developers are to learn new skills.) But let’s
also stipulate that once that happens, the “programmable surface area” of a
business, of the sciences, of our built infrastructure will rise in parallel. If there
are 20x the number of opportunities for programming to make a difference,
we’ll still need twice as many of those new 10x programmers!

User expectations are also going to rise. Businesses that simply use the greater
productivity to cut costs will lose out to companies that invest in harnessing the
new capabilities to build better services.

As Simon Willison, a longtime software developer who has been at the

forefront of showing the world how programming can be easier and better in
the AI era, notes, AI lets him “be more ambitious” with his projects.

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Take a lesson from another field where capabilities exploded: It may take as
long to render a single frame of one of today’s Marvel superhero movies
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did to render the entirety of the first Pixar film even though CPU/GPU price and
performance have benefited from Moore’s Law. It turns out that the movie
industry wasn’t content to deliver low-res crude animation faster and more
cheaply. The extra cycles went into thousands of tiny improvements in realistic
fur, water, clouds, reflections, and many many more pixels of resolution. The
technological improvement resulted in higher quality, not just cheaper/faster
delivery. There are some industries made possible by choosing cheaper/faster
over higher production values (consider the explosion of user-created video
online), so it won’t be either-or. But quality will have its place in the market. It
always does.

Imagine tens of millions of amateur AI-assisted programmers working with AI

tools like Replit and Devin or enterprise solutions like those provided by
Salesforce, Palantir, or Sierra. What is the likelihood that they will stumble over
use cases that will appeal to millions? Some of them will become the
entrepreneurs of this next generation of software created in partnership with
AI. But many of their ideas will be adopted, refined, and scaled by existing
professional developers.

The Journey from Prototype to Production

In the enterprise, AI will make it much more possible for solutions to be built by
those closest to any problem. But the best of those solutions will still need to
travel the rest of the way on what Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir, has
called “the journey from prototype to production.” Sankar noted that the value
of AI to the enterprise is “in automation, in enterprise autonomy.” But as he
also pointed out, “Automation is limited by edge cases.” He recalled the
lessons of Stanley, the self-driving car that won the DARPA Grand Challenge in
2005: able to do something remarkable but requiring another 20 years of
development to fully handle the edge cases of driving in a city.

“Workflow still matters,” Sankar argued, and the job of the programmer will be
to understand what can be done by traditional software, what can be done by
AI, what still needs to be done by people, and how you string things together
to actually accomplish the workflow. He notes that “a toolchain that enables
you to capture feedback and learn the edge cases to get there as quickly as
possible is the winning tool chain.” In the world Sankar envisions, AI is “actually
going to liberate developers to move into the business much more and be much
more levered in the impact they deliver.” Meanwhile, the top-tier subject
matter experts will become programmers with the help of AI assistants. It is

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not programmers who will be out of work. It will be the people—in every job
role—who don’t become AI-assisted programmers. SIGN IN Try Now

This is not the end of programming. It is the beginning of its latest reinvention.

On April 24, O’Reilly Media will be hosting Coding with AI: The End of
Software Development as We Know It—a live virtual tech conference
spotlighting how AI is already supercharging developers, boosting
productivity, and providing real value to their organizations. If you’re in
the trenches building tomorrow’s development practices today and
interested in speaking at the event, we’d love to hear from you by March 5.
You can find more information and our call for presentations here.

Post topics: AI & ML

Post tags: Deep Dive

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