PROGRAMMING
Code you can’t read, but machines love.
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Can you read this program?
We may be approaching a time when source code will no longer be understandable by humans.
Think about it for a moment — can you read the following program?
B4 09 BA 0E 01 CD 21 B4 00 CD 21 EB FE 0D 0A 48 65 6C 6C 6F 0D 0A 24AI created this program in about 5 seconds. It’s a fully working program that prints “Hello”.
This led me to some deeper curiosity about the future of programming.
Replacing programmers with AI
There has been no shortage of news about companies replacing human programmers with AI.
I’ve noticed this is becoming more common. Companies are relying upon AI copilots to perform ever larger amounts of programming enhancements, bug fixes, refactoring, and even writing entire applications. When running copilots in agentic mode, I’ve been even more astonished at their capability to perform so well.
It may very well become unnecessary for humans to review AI-generated code — let alone understand it at all.