I’m picturing a portrait miniature painter in the early 1800s (a widespread occupation at the time). I imagine he was meticulous with his painting, using a magnifying glass for details. He prided himself on both his artistry and his technique. He was good at what he did and he enjoyed the challenge. And then, all of a sudden, there was no more demand and he couldn’t pay the bills. Photography had arrived. So, like so many other portrait miniaturists, he bought a camera and started taking photos of people. Like his predecessors, he was a survivor and he would adapt for the sake of himself and his family. This wasn’t the first or last time in the history of humankind that technology had made obsolete a skill and an art form. In fact it’s more the rule than the exception. Did you know that before the machine was invented, Computer was a profession?
I enjoy these anecdotes from the history of technology. Still, it caught me off guard when, over the span of about a year, I found myself (and continue to find myself) inside of the latest such techno-historical anecdote, acting it out in real-time as the floor continues to shift from under my feet, day after day. I remember the feelings in my body from that moment when it finally hit me: Waves of disorientation washed over me. A vacillation between denial, dread, and confusion. The pit in my stomach: Existential nausea. I remember panicking; my heart racing. “Is this really happening? Am I out of a job for good?!” I imagine a future historian telling the anecdote: Did you know that for a brief period of time before they hilariously coded themselves out of a job, Computer programmer was a profession?
I started coding as a hobby when I was 8 years old and I eventually found myself to be at the right place at the right time for a well-paid and seemingly secure career doing something that I actually enjoyed. Now a middle-aged software developer, I had been intrigued with LLMs since their introduction and was in awe of the changes that were just dawning. I had played with coding LLMs enough to see how they were actually useful and could help me. They were tools that I could use to help me be more productive. Somehow though, for a while I allowed myself to unsee the obvious logical trajectory of it all. Only a few months later—the pace of progress smudging past my vision—the truth became impossible to ignore and I found myself fully present to this moment, standing naked in the rushing inferno of history.
There are a lot of reasons why I came to enjoy programming from a very young age. As a child living in a world seemingly indifferent to my desires, programming afforded me a kingdom where I was in control. For me, the joy of programming involves thinking about complex problems at the right levels of abstraction, such that my feeble brain can just about hold enough of the problem domain (and imagined solution) in my head at once; and then to finally transcribe that mental model into formal language that a computer can understand and act on. In short, the enjoyment came from the challenge of achieving fine-grained, low-level control of the computer, that optimally resulted in high-level, powerful programs.
The experience of using an LLM coding agent is nothing like that. High-level descriptions of desired outcomes are the input; powerful programs are the output. There is very little fine-grained control to speak of, and whatever control that you can squeeze out of it mostly comes from the umpteen iterations of the same style of high-level prompting in the hopes that it will get slightly closer to your imaginings. Sometimes I feel like a camera technician taking repeated photos of the same person. “This time try smiling.”
The loss of control spans not just a static change in working style, but also the fact that the pace of progress is such that every week begs a reevaluation of what has become possible since the last: both the goalpost and the methods by which we aim for it are in a continuous state of flux. To add insult to injury, with these continuing leaps in technology now on everyone’s radar, developers are simply expected to be racing up an asymptotic curve of productivity. The tools that have enabled us to do our jobs on steroids are leading to an unending pressure to produce faster, faster, faster, which encourages a further letting go of the fastidious control that programmers might enjoy.
I grew up feeling somewhat powerless. I never questioned it and I didn’t take it personally. I assumed that it was the plight of all conscious humans. I despised violence of all kinds and disowned any feelings that might insinuate an association. The way to make this work for me was to retreat from the world as much as possible; to just stay inside of myself. Our agreement was something like, “you don’t touch me, and I won’t touch you.” It was only at the tail end of adolescence that I woke up to the realization that life was happening and I was missing it. That I had been in a great slumber. That engagement is not equivalent to violence, and is a requirement for relationship. That I may not have much fine-grained control over myself and the world and the people around me, but neither am I powerless. I am still waking up to this realization.
I still hate violence of all kinds, but these days I start at the source: the ongoing inner violence that we inflict on ourselves habitually and mostly unconsciously. We snuff out large swatches of our sensory experience—oblivious to abundant potential and power—and just as readily fixate on idiosyncratic detail, obsessing over what we can or can’t control. We’re in a continuous state of distracting ourselves from the simultaneous adorned grandeur and stark simplicity of our immediate experience. When we chance a glimpse of the full picture—like encountering a moment of grace—we might retrospectively call it an exception, or a hallucinatory one-off. Otherwise, we might perceive glimpses of the vastness in the form of a personalized anxiety or dread that instantiates our fear of the intimated open unknown.
The queer and frequently uncomfortable feeling of it should not be surprising. Linger right there. The energy that finds you in this moment contains the inertia of the whole of human history along with your personal psycho-relational trajectory behind it, and who knows what else before it, and you are forever riding within its current. Power without much control is scary, but attempting to grab on to something stable in the face of these rapids is delusional.
My job has been seeming surreal of late. Recently I’ve been building a system to harness the power of our new capabilities for the purpose of autonomously taking over a large percentage of my and my colleagues’ day-to-day software development tasks (I assume the same is happening in all software studios). We named the system Edgar, but I’ve sometimes been calling it the monster. It was an experiment, and it has been working frighteningly better than I had expected. We’re more productive than ever but, paradoxically, we’re also busier than ever. In a disturbing turn of events, the monster is now incessantly asking us for help with things that only a flesh-unit can be trusted with.
My job suddenly asks me to wield a new power that seems simultaneously to be wielding me. This is frequently what conscious living is like anyway. To accept this is to recognize when the moment calls for engaging with life as if descending a scree slope. On scree terrain the ground is loose beneath you and there is no stable place to stand still, let alone from which to survey the descent. You actually have no idea what’s down there, but going back up is not possible. If you stiffen, dig in, and insist on stopping yourself, you are more likely to lose your footing and get hurt. So instead, you loosen. You open to the feeling of vertigo and let go of your stale interpretations of what it all means. You let gravity have some of you. You release yourself and take the next step, just as the terrain suddenly presents it, then the next one, faster and faster, and sometimes less elegantly than you would have chosen had all else been equal. One step at a time, over and over again, you relax control, lead with receptive honesty and humility, and engage with the rushing power within and without.
