The End of Programming as We Knew It

Long Live the AI

Programming has already changed forever and many of you must have realized this by now. Just a few years ago, being a great programmer meant diving deep into problem-solving, obsessing over data structures, algorithms, design patterns, and understanding the internals of programming languages. We took pride in navigating huge codebases, optimizing performance, and designing robust systems capable of scaling to millions of users. But today (or soon)? All of that is rapidly becoming less relevant.

The Shift Is Already Here

If I were entering college today, I wouldn’t learn programming the traditional way. Why spend countless hours mastering complex concepts when tools like ChatGPT (recently Codex), Gemini, Claude (coding agents), Cursor, Windsurf (SWE-1), Copilot etc have demonstrated exponential growth in their capabilities?

The transformation is undeniable — what was impossible last year is common today. These tools don’t just assist — they replace.

These tools aren’t just adding incremental value they’re fundamentally reshaping the engineering workflow. They can instantly generate functional code that implements:

• Complex algorithms, which once took weeks to understand and implement correctly