In 2023, John D. Cook wrote an article titled Solved problems becoming unsolved . His point was direct: Once a problem is considered “solved,” people’s attention may move elsewhere; but that does not mean the software built to solve it will remain usable forever. Environments, dependencies, and user needs keep changing. Links break, and programs can gradually become impossible to build. Some problems, then, become unsolved again. ...
Genesis 2:3 says: “Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all his work of creation.” Over the first six days, we have traveled a long road: We saw through the sugar coating of natural language , and recognized the review tax that overloads the brain ; We paused amid the Brownian motion of code , and recognized the ghost of round-trip engineering from thirty years ago ; ...
If, after reading the first five posts, you think this is a farewell ceremony for software engineering, with engineers about to lose their jobs , think again. Whenever revolutionary automation tools have appeared throughout history, prophets and the media have always been unable to resist saying, “Such-and-such is going to disappear; such-and-such is going to become unemployed.” But seventy years have passed, and these predictions have almost never come true. When Fortran appeared, the priests of assembly language were told they were finished; when VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet in history, was born , Wall Street declared that accountants were no longer needed. ...
A broken system is not frightening; you can fix it. More frightening is a system that starts up and runs smoothly, while everyone in the company knows only the rough outline and nobody knows exactly how it came to work. The words “it works ” are often one of the most devious disguises worn by a cybersecurity disaster. Over the past year or so, real incidents have taught us a harsh lesson about “default insecurity.” ...
Vibe coding delivers enormous productivity , and it feels great. But what makes it most maddening is not that AI cannot write, or writes badly. It is that you personally fixed a fiendish bug last Friday night. On Monday morning, in a good mood, you ask AI to casually add a button—and it “helpfully” wipes out your handwritten code wholesale, as if it were an obsolete draft. That feeling of being stabbed in the back by a teammate is not unique to AI. ...
Running on a treadmill at the gym at least burns a few calories; but sprinting on an AI coding treadmill is more likely to leave you exhausted, uncertain, and buried in technical debt. “I wrote two thousand lines of code with AI today!” may be the most addictive temptation facing developers right now. After analyzing more than 200 million lines of code , the software analytics team GitClear found that the real thing exploding after the spread of AI was not quality refactoring, but “code churn.” The proportion of freshly written code that is repeatedly overturned, modified, or simply deleted within two weeks has reached a historic high. ...
What was the bill mentioned in the previous post ? Who was it sent to? Who pays it? The answer may be a little ironic: The bill was sent directly to our eyes and brains. The software engineering world has held a consensus for decades: typing was never the bottleneck. Python became one of the world’s most popular languages in part because its creator, Guido van Rossum, designed it around the idea that “code is read much more often than it is written .” ...
In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, made a memorable remark : “The hottest new programming language is English.” It sounds a lot like a new myth Silicon Valley has just invented. But if “giving computers instructions in human language” could eliminate engineers and software engineering, then the discipline should have been declared finished back in 1959. That was the year Grace Hopper championed COBOL . The promise she made to the business world was remarkably similar to today’s vibe coding: ...