My daughter Emma is 11. She's been vibe coding lately, and honestly, she's pretty good at it.
The other day she looked over my shoulder at my IDE and asked: "Dad, was there ever a time when a developer had to write each one of those characters by hand?"
I said yeah, like six months ago.
It was her follow-up that gave me pause: "But how did you know what to write?"
I had to stop and think about it, because that question — how did you know what to write — was basically the entire profession. That was the craft. That was what I spent my career getting good at.
I started coding at six on a TRS-80. This was my first program:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Back then, kids' magazines printed BASIC programs in the back pages and you'd copy them character by character and run them. That's how a lot of us got hooked.
Then it got more powerful, more complex, and a lot harder to break into.
For most of my career, the standard loop was: write some code → hit a wall → Google it → find a StackOverflow answer → copy, paste, tweak. That ran from the late 90s to roughly 2022. Then everything changed.
I recently picked up woodworking as a hobby, and AI coding tools feel a lot like the moment power tools entered the shop. Does the circular saw replace the handsaw entirely? Does it just mean I build ten times as many birdhouses? Those questions are still unresolved for me.
What I do know is this: there has never been a better time to invite someone new into programming. The barrier that built up over decades is coming down fast.
If you're feeling scared by how fast things are moving, the best thing you can do is start building something. Anything. You might find it's a lot more fun than it is scary.
If this spoke to you, check out the full video here:
