My daughter asked if developers used to write code by hand, but it was the follow-up question that surprised me.

Shifting the focus from syntax to judgment

My daughter, who’s 11, has been doing some vibe coding.

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?”

“Yes. Twelve months ago.”

“But… how did you know what to write?”

Which was a weird, because up until recently, “knowing what to write,” was sort of the whole ballgame.

I recently picked up woodworking as a hobby, and have found a lot of similarities to coding. For most of my life, developers have considered themselves craftsman. We’d hand place each character.

Then, about three years ago, the coding gods dropped power tools on us, and now we’re all trying to figure out what this means for the profession. Do we still need handsaws? Will the circular saw build the bench for us? Does this mean we should be able to make 10x more birdhouses in the same amount of time?

It is an exciting, and scary time to be a professional software developer. But there’s also never been a better time to learn how to build software.

If this spoke to you, check out the full video here: