And can it actually program?
In everything I've written about the loom I've talked about tasks: checking email, watching a backup, auditing a server. Office work, the kind you do from nine to five. And I've kept quiet, out of some sort of modesty, about the system's greatest virtue — the one that truly brings me back to the craft. It programs.
And when I say programming I don't mean the AI spitting out a twenty-line script. I mean standing up an entire application — with its login, its create, its delete, its edit, its listing — in hours. Sometimes in little more than minutes. It sounds like a snake-oil brochure, I know. It isn't, and I'm going to explain why.
The secret isn't artificial intelligence. The secret is older than it: almost every business application is the same application. A user logs in with a password. Sees a list. Creates a record. Edits it. Deletes it, and the program asks whether they're sure. The fields change, the table name changes, the colour of the logo changes — the skeleton is identical. It always has been. That skeleton is my framework: the login, the datagrid, the form, the query. Written once, repeated a thousand times.
The only thing that doesn't repeat is the face. And for the face you no longer even need a designer: you ask one of those tools that draw screens — a Claude that mocks up the interface, a canvas where you drag boxes around, a template bought for twenty euros in a marketplace of themes. You've got the look. What's underneath — that the button saves, that the list paginates, that the delete warns you — is pattern. You describe it to the AI with the framework underneath, and it weaves it.
And this is where the smoke clears, to be honest. Because the application «finished» in an afternoon isn't finished: it's standing. Then come the days — yes, days, not minutes — of debugging. Put this field here. Take that button off there. When the operator does this, respond like that. Don't let this warning fire if the amount is zero. Programming as it's always been, the kind that hasn't changed in forty years, the kind that was never fast and never will be.
And all of that I've done without writing a single line of code.
To a programmer of my generation that ought to hurt. It doesn't hurt me. It took me many years at the trade to understand it, but I had always understood it: programming was never writing code.
Writing code was the mechanical part — the part we did by hand because there was no other way. Typing, with rules. Programming was something else, and it's the part that's still mine: programming was controlling the flow. The operator's flow — what they see, what they touch, what happens when they make a mistake, and they always make a mistake. The data's flow — where it comes from, where it's stored, who may touch it and who may not. The logic's flow — what happens before what, which condition rules over which other. That's programming. The rest is typing.
The AI types like no one else. In whatever language you ask, without typos, without tiring, at any hour. But it doesn't understand the flows. It doesn't know that that operator, the flesh-and-blood one, the one who sits down at eight in the morning, is going to press the button twice because they always press it twice. It doesn't know that that record can't be deleted even though the form allows it. It doesn't know that that validation, flawless on paper, is going to shut out precisely the one case that mattered. That I know. And that's why I program the application — even if I don't write the code.
The framework provides the skeleton. The AI provides the muscles. The design provides the face. But the nervous system — the flow — is still provided by the old programmer. That is, for now, the line the machine does not cross.
Writing code has stopped being my trade. Controlling the flow hasn't. And I suspect it won't be for whatever's left of my career.
— an old programmer · 64 · rss