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Created May 10, 2026 03:55 — forked from tamnd/programmer.md
The Programmer After AI

The Programmer After AI

Programming used to leave fingerprints.

A person who wrote a piece of code had usually spent enough time inside it to know something about it. Not everything, and often less than they claimed, but enough to carry some memory of the choices. They had named the variables, moved the data around, found the missing branch, stared at the error, and returned to the same file often enough that the program had passed through them.

That link has weakened. A programmer can now produce a large diff without having lived with the decisions inside it. The code can arrive with good names, reasonable structure, plausible tests, and a calm explanation of the tradeoffs. It can look considered before anyone has really considered it.

This changes the job.