An Obituary for Programming: What AI Agents Take Away

Simon Willison points to a short but poignant note by Jeremy Scheff, who mourns not so much the profession of programming itself as the thing that made it so appealing.

A dream job

Scheff describes programming as one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to tinker with tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the problem, the higher the fee. Even fairly simple puzzles paid well, because ordinary people simply couldn't solve them. They needed us.

And it wasn't only about the money. Clients brought a problem, and programmers solved it the way they saw fit. We set the strategy, we defined the timeline, we decided what was and was not possible.

What is changing

Now coding AI agents are redistributing that pleasure. Willison frames the fork in the road plainly and honestly. For anyone who delights in the outcome — a working system — and isn't too attached to which problems had to be solved along the way, large language models are the gift that keeps on giving.

But if the joy lay precisely in the direct confrontation with the problem, in the act of untangling it, then the loss is very real. Someone else now solves the puzzle.

A quiet farewell

The note isn't a manifesto against progress, nor does it predict the industry's demise. It reads more like a personal goodbye to a particular kind of pleasure — the very one that drew many into the field in the first place. Automation doesn't erase the work outright, but it changes its nature: what was an intellectual game risks becoming oversight of someone else's decisions. For some that is liberation; for others, a quiet loss.

Source: Simon Willison