I Am No Longer a Programmer — and I Tried, Briefly, to Feel Bad About It

In which the author says a sentence out loud, hears how it sounds, and then spends an unreasonable number of sections establishing that the correct response to it is not grief, not panic, and — most disappointingly for everyone involved — not even a decent existential crisis. Let’s call it simply:…

In which the author says a sentence out loud, hears how it sounds, and then spends an unreasonable number of sections establishing that the correct response to it is not grief, not panic, and — most disappointingly for everyone involved — not even a decent existential crisis. Let’s call it simply: “A Farewell to Arms, Filed Without Regret”……tinkering around, nobody checking…I said it to a friend, late, in the tone men our age use instead of therapy: I’m not a programmer anymore.And I heard, immediately, what it sounded like. Not a career announcement. Not a complaint. It sounded like a man in a bar telling you, with a small and not entirely unhappy smile, that he used to be a partisan. That there was a forest once, and a unit, and things that mattered enormously at the time. That nobody has needed any of it for years — and that the forest, incidentally, is a housing estate now, and the estate is perfectly nice, and his grandchildren live in it.That’s the register. A farewell to arms, without a bugle, without a pension, and — this is the part that surprised me most — without regret. What follows is my working.I. The Sentence, Unpacked“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates, who never had to fill in a timesheet…the day’s work, itemised, suspiciously typing-free…Here’s what an ordinary working day looks like now. Audit your own against it; I’ll wait.I described what a system needed to do. I corrected a misunderstanding about its behaviour at the edges. I said the same thing again in smaller words, because the first version had been too clever and had produced something confident and wrong. I decided — and this was the only irreplaceable act of the day — that one particular behaviour was diplomatically convenient and factually dishonest, and that we’d be doing the honest one anyway. Then I checked the result and found the place where the machine had invented a requirement nobody had asked for, with the serene confidence of a man in a pub explaining the offside rule.Shipped. Worked. And not one minute of it was programming in the sense I spent two decades learning.Show me that day twenty years ago, and I’d have called it the job of a business analyst, in the tone one reserves for describing a cousin’s career in insurance. Today it’s the part of the work nobody else in the building can do, and the near-total absence of typing has stopped registering as a demotion. That journey — from insult to job description — is the entire story. Everything below is me trying to be honest about it while remaining, at all times, insufferable.II. Not Destroyed. Declassified.“I’m not dead yet! I think I’ll go for a walk!” — Monty Python and the Holy Grail, on the state of the profession…the cart, the corpse, the walk & “not quite dead, yet”…Our industry’s argument about all this is stuck on the wrong verb. Everyone wants to know whether programming has been destroyed — killed, replaced, made obsolete, whichever apocalypse fits the headline and the funding round. It’s the wrong question, and it produces two equally tiresome camps: the mourners, who are grieving a corpse that keeps insisting it’s not dead yet and would quite like to go for a walk; and the salesmen, who are cheerfully loading it onto the cart anyway because they’re paid by the body.The accurate verb is quieter and much less marketable. Programming stopped being the problem.Not a problem. The problem — the one that required a heroic solution. For most of my working life, the central difficulty in getting software to exist was the making of it: the months of construction, the artisanal maintenance afterwards, the accumulated skill needed to persuade a machine to do a moderately complicated thing without lying about it. That was the bottleneck. Everything else — the salaries, the mythology, the conference circuit, the job titles, the entire flattering self-image of my profession — was scaffolding erected around that single hard fact.The hard fact has moved. Not vanished; moved. Construction became cheap enough that the difficulty relocated upward into the questions surrounding it: what should exist, why, who’s accountable, what happens when it’s wrong, and what precisely the business means by that word it keeps using in meetings as though everyone agrees on it.Which is a demotion for the craft and a promotion for the judgment. I notice that the people most upset about this are, overwhelmingly, the ones who preferred the craft. Understandable. It was the fun part. It was also — and I say this with love, at this hour, among friends — the part most amenable to being performed by something that doesn’t require lunch, sleep, or a difficult conversation about its title.III. The Cobbler’s Queue“The shoemaker’s children go barefoot.” — proverb, several nations, all of them correct…church shoes, carried, not worn…Here’s the analogy that finally settled it for me. Three acts, and the third is where we live.Act one…A pair of shoes was once a problem. It required a craftsman, an apprenticeship, tools, hides, and years of skill you couldn’t fake. You joined a queue measured in seasons. You paid a serious fraction of a year’s earnings. And the resulting shoes were so valuable that people walked to church barefoot and put them on at the door, because ruining them was not a recoverable event, and because God, being reasonable, could see the shoes were in your hand.Act two…Shoes stopped being a problem, and the problem became getting yourself to the shopping centre to see whether they’re on sale. Same object; entirely different difficulty. The craft hadn’t disappeared — it had emigrated into a factory and then onto a container ship, and human effort had migrated from manufacture to selection.Act three…Now it’s whatever arrives from a website, and if the sole detaches there’s tape and a shrug. Nobody’s grandchildren will be told about these shoes. Nobody will walk anywhere barefoot on their account.And here’s the part the mourners skip and the salesmen never mention: the cobbler still exists. Bespoke shoemakers are alive, magnificent, booked out for months, and serve enthusiasts, luxury buyers, and people with difficult feet. The trade didn’t die. It stopped being the way shoes happen and became a boutique on a street where everybody else buys online.That’s not a tragedy. That’s a change of address, and the postal service has been fully informed. Now substitute “software” for “shoes” throughout, including the bit about God being reasonable, and you have my thesis.IV. Heroism Was a Price, Not a Virtue“We few, we happy few.” — Shakespeare, on a project that shipped a year late and changed everyone involved…the bridge, defended, subsequently demolished for a car park…Every senior engineer has a campaign. The application that consumed a large team for the better part of a year, argued over in rooms with whiteboards, defended in review with the intensity of men defending a bridge, and leaving behind a bond that no corporate away-day has ever successfully manufactured. We speak of these with reverence. The reverence is real, and I’m not here to sneer at it — I have mine, and I’d bore you with it given the smallest opening and a second drink.But here’s the arithmetic nobody does out loud. That project didn’t take a year and a small army because the problem required a year and a small army. It took that because the tools of the era charged that much. The heroism was the invoice, not the achievement.Which is why today’s version of the same conversation — “could you just generate that by Friday? it’s only meant to be a demo” — is not the insult it feels like. It stings, certainly. It stings because it revalues the currency our self-respect was denominated in, and nobody enjoys waking up to find their savings redenominated overnight by a central bank they didn’t vote for. But the request is usually correct. It really is a demo. It really can be done by Friday. What changed isn’t the significance of the work; it’s the price of the labour — and we had been quietly conflating the two for about thirty years, the way one conflates the cost of a wedding with the quality of a marriage.I mourn the campaigns a bit. I would be lying if I said I want the invoice reissued.V. The Milk Is Spilled“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” — attributed to everyone; correct regardless…the milk, the floor, the futility…Now the argument I’d defend in a hostile room, because it makes most of the industry’s current shouting irrelevant.Everybody is litigating the bubble. Will it pop; will the big labs survive; will the valuations turn out to have been blockchain in a better suit; will some smaller outfit somewhere quietly eat everyone’s lunch and then their pension. My answer to all of it: it does not matter, because the milk is already spilt.Note what this argument doesn’t require. It doesn’t require any lab to survive. It doesn’t require scaling to continue, valuations to make sense, or agents to achieve enlightenment. It requires only what is already true on an ordinary evening: an over-trained open-weights model, a decent laptop, a network connection — and you can knock out a serious slab of scaffolding in a few hours. Better than a competent team of my generation managed in a month of not sleeping. With tests. And with documentation, which — I feel obliged to note — that team did not produce, because at 3 AM documentation is what you solemnly promise to do next sprint, in the same voice you use for the gym.You cannot un-ring that. If the entire commercial edifice collapsed on a Wednesday, then on Thursday I could still describe a system to a machine and receive a working sketch of it. The capability has left the boardroom and moved into the spare room, where it sits next to the exercise bike, being used considerably more often.So the bubble debate is a debate about the weather over an industry’s share price. It is not a debate about the trade. The trade already changed — quietly, without a press release, at some point while we were all still arguing about whether it would.VI. So It Goes“DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.” — Terry Pratchett (with Neil Gaiman, who will want that noted), Good Omens — kinder about it than the industry manages…the hourglass, the spreadsheet, the queue…I’d like to hold a small funeral now, because I’ve noticed that our profession has no rites, and a trade without rites is a trade that processes its grief in Slack, badly, at length, in threads.So, in the manner of Vonnegut, who understood that the only dignified way to record a death is briefly:The junior who learned the framework everyone agreed was the future, and who is now the only person alive who remembers its lifecycle hooks. So it goes.The architecture I defended for three weeks, which was correct, which won, and which was deleted eleven months later by a man who had not been born when the argument started. So it goes.The certification. So it goes.The build tool that was going to end build tools. So it goes. Its successor, currently in beta, currently perfect, currently the last one we’ll ever need. So it goes.The version of me who could hold an entire system in his head at once, and who was insufferable about it, and who was — this is the part I mind — actually right that it mattered. So it goes.The other version of me, some years later, who learned to stop holding it all and trust the tests instead, and who was also right, and who is also gone. So it goes.The evenings. Genuinely, the evenings — the ones spent on problems that a machine now resolves during the time it takes to make tea. I’ve had people tell me those evenings were stolen from me and that I should be angry. I’m not. I enjoyed most of them. But they’re dead all the same, and pretending otherwise is how you become the man at the bar who won’t stop describing the forest. So it goes.And here’s the thing about Pratchett’s Death (or rather DEATH), which I’ve always found more consoling than any corporate wellness programme: he isn’t cruel. He isn’t even particularly interested in you. He’s just punctual, and he has a job, and he’d honestly rather you didn’t make a scene about it. The professions have a Death too, and his hourglass runs on unit economics. When he comes for a trade he doesn’t come with malice. He comes with a spreadsheet.VII. One Dog“The narcissism of small differences.” — Freud, scrolling a framework comparison…thirty technologies, four quadrants, one dog…Look at any respectable technology radar: four quadrants, thirty-odd entries, adopt and trial and experiment and hold. Elixir, Go, Rust, TypeScript, this season’s front-end favourite, the databases, the orchestration, the infrastructure-as-a-noun. Each entry represents somebody’s holy war, somebody’s conference talk, somebody’s blog post with an unwise number of exclamation marks.And I find, at this stage, that I could not care less. I say that with real affection for several of them.Because they’re dialects. Different ways of saying the same thing at different levels of effectiveness, with different emphases, different failure modes, and different merchandise. One puts the accent on concurrency, another on types, another on developer joy, another on not frightening the enterprise. These are genuine differences — I’ve written entire essays about them, with code samples, at unreasonable length, and I’d do it again. And still: one dog, as we say where I’m from. The same dog, in a succession of coats, being walked past the same lamp post by different people who each believe they invented walking.What I notice now is that nearly every argument I ever had about the coat was an argument I could have skipped. The projects that failed did not fail on dialect. They failed because nobody had established what was being built, for whom, or what “done” meant — and there is no framework for that, though God knows one is announced every autumn.VIII. The Language With Query in the Name“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” — Voltaire, allegedly; and if not, he should have…SELECT * FROM career WHERE lesson IS NOT NULL…So if the dialect doesn’t matter, what’s left? The same thing that was there at the start — which is the joke it has taken me twenty years to get, and which I’d like to explain slowly, the way one explains a joke to a table that has stopped laughing.What remains is knowing which questions to ask.Consider where a great many of us began: a declarative language in which you describe the result you want and let the machine work out how to obtain it. It has the word Query in the name. It is right there in the name. And in the rooms where it was used, nobody asked (usually, or rather initially, my dear fellow SQL comrades) whether the query would return in eight seconds or twelve, or whether the syntax was idiomatic, or whether the index was elegant. The question that consumed every meeting was: what exactly are we asking? Which data, for which decision, phrased how, ruling out which of the six things the business meant by the word “active” — six, and they’d been using it for years, and nobody had noticed, and two of the six were mutually exclusive.Then the industry spent two decades persuading us that the real work was the how: the loops, the memory, the lifecycle, the mechanics, the beautiful machinery, the whole magnificent apparatus. And now the mechanics have been folded back down into the machine — where, if we’re honest, they always lived — and what remains standing on the surface is describing precisely what you want, in a language resembling English, to something that will handle the how.We didn’t advance into a new era. We got sent back to the query, with better tooling and worse hair.IX. A Note on Consistency (Or: Answering My Own Earlier Essay)“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” — Walt Whitman, pre-emptively defending every essayist who ever lived…the keeper of intent, keyboard suspiciously clean…At this point a certain kind of reader — the best kind, the one who has been here before — is preparing a comment, and it’s a fair one, so let me hand them the ammunition properly.I once wrote several thousand words arguing that programming was never about code. That code is merely the most recent notation for something far older: the human act of structuring intent into executable form. That the Jacquard loom and the Roman drill manual and the medieval ale recipe were all programming, that the medium keeps changing and the role doesn’t, and that we are — the phrase was mine and I stand by it — the keepers of intent.By that definition, this entire essay is nonsense. If programming is structuring intent, then a man who spends his days deciding what a system should do, in what order, with what guarantees, and who carries the blame when it’s wrong, is not a former programmer. He is a programmer with a suspiciously clean keyboard.So which is it?Both, and the confusion is in the word, which is doing two jobs and has been for decades. There is the act — structuring intent, asking the right question, deciding what should exist — which is ancient, which survives every notation, and which I do more of now than I ever did. And there is the occupation — the specific trade, in the specific labour market, defined by the guild in the specific sense of the person who converts intent into notation by hand, and is paid for the conversion. That’s the one I’ve left. That’s the one the tools repriced.The earlier essay was a prediction made in the third person: the medium will change, the role will persist. This one is the invoice arriving, in the first person, which is a considerably less comfortable place to sit. It’s easy to write serenely about the eternal return of abstraction when you’re describing the wave. It’s a different sensation to notice that you’re standing in it and your shoes are wet.Notice also that the cobbler handles this perfectly, as he handles everything else in this essay. In the factory he is still, unquestionably, in footwear. Shoes remain his entire life. He simply isn’t a craftsman anymore — not because he forgot how, but because the guild’s word meant something specific, and the specific thing is no longer what he’s paid for. He can say both sentences without lying: I have made shoes all my life, and I am not a shoemaker.So: no recantation. The earlier essay said the alphabet would change and the role wouldn’t. It changed. The role didn’t. What neither of us — me, and the me who wrote that — quite appreciated is that the job title is attached to the alphabet, not to the role. The title goes with the notation. The work stays with you.Which is either a consolation or a redundancy notice, depending on how much of your identity you’d deposited in the title. Mine was, embarrassingly, most of it. That’s what this whole essay has been about.X. Nobody Asks Whether You Beat the Casio“The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.” — Richard Hamming, who meant it more literally than we have allowed…the casio, undefeated since long division…The most domestic example available, and the one that ends the conversation…When you sit down with a calculator to do the household budget, you do not pause to consider whether you’d have been quicker in your head. The question is absurd. The Casio wins, always, and nobody in the history of arithmetic has framed this as a defeat for the human spirit. What matters is whether you remembered the insurance renewal, whether you were honest about the takeaway line, and whether the number at the bottom means what you think it means — which, in my household, it historically has not.Same when planning supplies for a trip. Same in every room where a decision was ever taken from data. The instrument’s speed was never the interesting variable. The framing was.So when someone tells me the machine writes the loop faster than I do — yes. Obviously. It also spells better, works weekends, and does not become bleak in November. The calculator beat me at long division decades ago and I have made my peace with the calculator; we nod at each other in the hallway. The interesting question was always one floor up: what are we computing, why, and would anyone notice if it were wrong?Which is, unfashionably, still my job. It simply isn’t called programming, and the people who name jobs are not to be trusted with anything sharp.XI. Bash, Out of Laziness“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because he will find an easy way to do it.” — attributed to Bill Gates; older than the attribution, truer than both…one command, zero right-clicks, infinite smugness…A confession that undermines whatever dignity the preceding sections accumulated: most of what I’ve kept from the old trade, I kept out of sloth.I live in the shell — not from philosophical commitment to the terminal, though I’ve read those manifestos and written one or two, but because typing a rename is faster than hunting through a context menu for the word “rename”. Graphical interfaces are for people with time on their hands. That’s the whole ideology, laid bare on the table like a suspect’s possessions: I am not a purist, I am a man economising on mouse travel.And I suspect this is the honest engine beneath most technical conviction. We tell ourselves we chose the tool for its type system, its architecture, its philosophy. Occasionally true! More often we chose it because it asked less of us on a Tuesday, and the philosophy arrived some weeks later, in a nice coat, and was introduced to colleagues as though it had been there all along.Worth remembering the next time someone explains their stack to you with a straight face. Worth remembering rather more often when it’s me.XII. A Note From the Shortage Economy“We pretended to work and they pretended to pay us.” — the standard joke, entire region, several decades…the queue, the plan, the shoe…I should declare an interest here, because it explains why this essay is calm and why an equivalent essay written in California would be either a manifesto or a suicide note.I come from a part of the world that spent the second half of the twentieth century conducting an enormous field experiment in scarcity. Queues for things that existed. Absences of things that were officially plentiful. A five-year plan for a shoe. The result is a cultural nervous system with two permanent settings: abundance is suspicious, and this too will be reorganised, probably by someone who has not thought it through.You’d think this would make us the most pessimistic readers of the current moment. In fact it does something more useful. It makes us immune to both halves of the discourse. When Silicon Valley announces that everything is about to change forever, the Eastern European ear hears a familiar cadence — we were told that too, at length, on posters — and files it accordingly. And when the same industry announces, six months later, that everything is ending forever, we hear the same cadence in a minor key, and file that in the same drawer, which is by now quite full.What’s left, once you’ve discounted both prophecies, is the boring middle: things get cheaper, professions reorganise, some people lose a livelihood and some gain one, and nobody sends a letter of apology. This is not cynicism. It’s just what history looks like from a place that has had rather a lot of it recently and has learned to keep the receipts.Which is why I can write “I’m no longer a programmer” without the accompanying scream. The scream is a luxury belief. It requires having believed, at some point, that your professional category was a permanent feature of the universe rather than a temporary arrangement between a market and a set of tools. Where I’m from, nobody’s grandmother believed that about anything.XIII. The Watchmaker Clause (I Am Not Fukuyama)“The end of history will be a very sad time.” — Francis Fukuyama, subsequently obliged to watch history continue for thirty-five years…the bench, by appointment only :: pus I am crappy Arch user…The section where I disarm my own thesis, because otherwise somebody else will and they’ll enjoy it more than I would.First, the clarification I owe anyone reading this as a resignation letter, because it isn’t one. Sorry. I haven’t left. I’m still here — digitalisation, systems, everything downstream of code, all of it still my working life and likely to remain so until somebody makes me stop. What’s changed is the category, and the shoes have the vocabulary for it: when a cobbler takes a job in a shoe factory, he doesn’t leave footwear. He’s there every morning; he knows more about shoes than anyone on the line, and his judgment is precisely why the machines are set up correctly at all. But he’s stopped being a craftsman in the sense the guild meant, and pretending otherwise would be sentimental. He’s now something else in the same industry. That’s my position exactly. I didn’t quit the trade; I changed what I am inside it, and the honest move is to say so rather than keep the old title because it sounds better at parties.Second, the thesis itself, fenced properly. “Programming is over” belongs to a distinguished genre of sentences that age like fish in a warm room. Fukuyama announced the end of history, was misread by essentially everybody, and has spent three decades being beaten with a book he didn’t quite write — which is the single strongest argument I know for writing carefully and the single strongest argument I know for not writing at all.So, precisely, what I am not claiming. Programming is not dead. There is IoT. There is embedded work — real silicon, real constraints, C and increasingly Zig and Rust, done by people who genuinely understand the machine and can tell when it’s lying. There is hyperoptimisation, where one percent of throughput is somebody’s entire quarter, and where the machine’s suggestions are confidently wrong in ways only a specialist can smell.But two honesties. First: even there, the practitioner now sits with machine assistance — arguing with a suggestion rather than typing into a void. The assistance reached the monastery as well; it simply knocks more politely and removes its shoes. Second, and this is the cobbler doing his final shift: the demand for watchmakers, or for hand-polished soles, is not what it was in an age of mass-market footwear and, failing that, tape. The craft persists. The market for it is a boutique. A boutique is a wonderful place to work if you’re the right sort of person; it is a district within the industry, not the industry.So: not the end of history. Merely the end of one labour market being the default — a smaller claim, and a far better-supported one. Ask me in ten years. I’ll either look prescient or like a man who wrote a great deal about shoes.XIV. What We Argue About Now“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” — Einstein, probably not, but the sentence has outlived the correction…four teams, one shared misunderstanding…Here’s the evidence the trade has moved, and none of it involves AI.Look at what the arguments are about now. Not which language — that debate was settled by exhaustion, which is how most debates end and the only mechanism that reliably works. The genuine problems on my desk: how to reduce the coordination cost between four teams; where the data legally lives; who is accountable when it breaks; how to keep a system comprehensible to the people who will inherit it after everyone who built it has moved on to a company with a better coffee machine; and what, exactly, we owe the person at the other end of the thing. Every one of those is an organisational problem wearing a technical hat and hoping nobody checks its badge.Even the wheel-reinvention era is closing. The monolith problem was solved years ago, several times over, by frameworks still sitting there, unfashionable and entirely functional, like a reliable relative nobody invites to parties. The API problem likewise. We spent a decade re-implementing solved problems in newer syntax and calling it progress, and the only durable innovation to emerge from most of those cycles was the lanyard.So the interesting problems aren’t gone. They stopped being code-shaped. Which is, I suspect, the real reason I no longer feel like a programmer: not that the machine took the job, but that the part of it I was any good at turned out to live one floor above the code, and always had, and I could have taken the stairs at any point in the last fifteen years.XV. The Sinusoid, In Formalwear“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9, still undefeated…the pendulum, in a blazer and The Tables Are So Back, screw you CSS…Regular readers know I can’t leave without the sinusoid, and this one has dressed for the office.The blazers will come back. I want this on record with a date on it: somewhere a company is drafting a return-to-formality policy, and within a decade an earnest twenty-eight-year-old will explain to me that in-person, jacket-on collaboration drives trust and measurable outcomes, and he will have a study, and the study will have been funded by someone who owns an office building. The bells will come back. Tables instead of CSS will come back under a new name involving the word “primitive” or “grid”, presented as a radical simplification — and note that this one has already started, which tells you everything about the speed of the wheel. Even inline CSS will come back (watching at you TailwindCSS).And the deep version: the craft will come back. Not as the default — that’s gone, that’s what the milk means — but as a distinction, the way handmade shoes are a distinction. There will be teams that write everything by hand and charge a premium, and they will be right to, and their market will be small and prestigious and slightly insufferable, and I will read their blog with enormous affection and no intention of hiring them.The cycle undoes nothing. It merely keeps reassigning the same activities between necessity and luxury, while each generation mistakes its own position on the wave for the shape of the ocean, and writes an essay about it. Present company emphatically included.XVI. We Don’t Care (And the Book in the Hands)“WE DON’T CARE.” — printed on cotton, in capitals, by people who plainly did…actually we do care, maybe not about the things you think we do…There’s an image I keep returning to, and it’s the most accurate portrait of my professional generation I’ve encountered: a man of a certain age in a black t-shirt reading GEN X · 1965–1980 · WE DON’T CARE — the dates depending on which demographer you trust, and they don’t agree, and none of them care either — holding a freshly bought copy of Advanced Python.The shirt is the pose. We don’t care. We’ve seen fourteen paradigm shifts. We were promised the semantic web. Nothing impresses us; we’ve been disappointed by professionals.The book is the truth. We’re standing in a living room on a weekday evening, still buying manuals, still doing the reading, still — after everything — quietly curious about whether there’s a better way to do the thing.And I want to pay a debt here, because the book in that photograph isn’t an accident and it isn’t nostalgia. If the job is now explaining a system to a machine, then it needs a language of explanation — and Python is, by some distance, the least obstructive one we have. It is very nearly executable pseudocode*. You can describe an intent in it without first negotiating with the grammar; you spend your attention on the problem rather than on the ceremony surrounding the problem. That is not a small property. In a decade where the scarce resource is precision about what you mean, the language that gets out of the way of meaning wins, and it isn’t close.*The purists will crucify me for this, and they’ll be technically correct, which is the most Pythonic way to be correct. Yes: there is a deep, disciplined, thoroughly uber-Pythonic way of writing it — the type hints, the protocols, the Pydantic models, the whole ascetic tradition. It’s excellent. It is also, mostly, not what makes Python the right tool for the thing I’m describing. I’m praising it for the opposite virtue: that a person can say what they mean in it on the first attempt, badly, and still be understood. Which, come to think of it, is also the only reason any of us survived our twenties.Rust I keep for the other thing entirely — as a hobby, and as a scalpel. When something needs to be looked at under a lens and corrected precisely, at one specific point, I’ll reach for it happily, and I have written more than enough words elsewhere about why. But that’s a boutique visit, in the sense established several sections ago. The everyday work — the explaining, the framing, the asking of the right question — has found its dialect, and its dialect is the one that argues with me least.Oh… and there is Go I really love: but honestly — it has the same place in my drawer as bash scripting or other forks and knives. Personal preference is one thing, and usability is yet another one.Studied disaffection in the foreground; homework in the hands. Neither element is a lie. It’s simply that only one of them is load-bearing, and it isn’t the shirt.That’s the note I’d like to leave on, if I’m leaving. Not I don’t care — I care, embarrassingly, still, at an age when caring has stopped being fashionable and started being slightly undignified. What’s gone is the requirement that the trade be heroic before I’m permitted to enjoy it.XVII. Epilogue: Without Regret“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” — Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms…all quiet on coding front…So: the goodbye, and then the kettle.I’m not a programmer. I’m a man who explains systems to machines, decides what ought to exist, determines whether the thing in front of him is that, and absorbs the blame when it isn’t. Twenty years ago I’d have found that description insulting. Now it’s the part of the work nobody else can do, and the absence of typing has stopped registering as loss.Why without regret? Three reasons, then the door.The trade was never the point — the questions were, and those turn out to be the durable asset, which is a genuinely reassuring thing to discover about your own skills at an age when most discoveries go the other way. The heroism was a price, not a virtue, and I am not sentimental enough to want that invoice reissued. And the craft isn’t dead — it’s a boutique now, the boutique is full of people I admire, I visit, and I buy the hand-stitched pair, and I keep them for good.I did try, briefly, to feel bad. I said the maudlin sentence out loud and waited for the melancholy to land properly, the way you wait for a sneeze that doesn’t come. It didn’t land. What landed instead was that something had shipped that day, it worked, the right questions had got it there, and the machine had done the typing — which, let’s be honest for one final line, was never the part I loved.That’s the thing about the old partisan in the bar. He isn’t sad the war ended. He’s aware the forest is a housing estate, that nobody needs what he was extraordinarily good at, and that on balance this is excellent news for everybody, including him. He’d just like someone, once, to know there was a forest.He smiles when he tells it. So do I.The arms are laid down, the papers are in order, nobody’s at the gate, and the kettle’s boiled.As you were.…there was a forrest once,,Krzyś, aka The Author, aka formerly a programmer and currently something harder to put on a form, remains a full-stack Stoic and a part-time cynic. He can be found explaining requirements to machines, asking businesses what they actually mean by the words they keep using, and buying Python manuals while wearing a t-shirt announcing his indifference. His therapist, told that the client had said farewell to arms, asked which arms. He is still thinking about it.This story is published on Generative AI. Connect with us on LinkedIn and follow Zeniteq to stay in the loop with the latest AI stories.Subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube channel to stay updated with the latest news and updates on generative AI. Let’s shape the future of AI together!I Am No Longer a Programmer — and I Tried, Briefly, to Feel Bad About It was originally published in Generative AI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Source: Generative AI Pub — Published July 28, 2026 at 01:52 UTC — Category: Image AI