I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

I found it a very weird section of the article, undoing most of what had been written before.

Whether it's ROM programming, writing assembly, or C, or Rust, or JS-with-stdlib, at no point was anyone "teetering". Stacks have always existed, and whether your stack was small because it just had not much under it, or huge because it's 2026, they've by and large always been stable. That's the point of a stack: you can trust the parts below the layer you're working on, and the problems you solve are still real problems that for the most part don't require knowing the lower parts of the stack but are still real problem sin programming.

It's like making fun of people who drive a company rental because they don't want to own one themselves, and can't name any part of their engine: you're just being an ass.

Even the good TS programmers understand classic programming concepts like using the right data structures, paying attention to runtime complexity, and knowing when to go "maybe it's the step below me". They can work out difficult problems just fine.

You were writing an article about how fundamentally different AI has made things: why dunk on people who got into programming more recently than you and started higher on the ladder of abstraction, mocking them for "you were already about to fall". No, they weren't. They understood the core concepts just fine, and we collectively gave them stacks that they could trust. And they would have transitioned to "the next thing" just like you've been doing.

And then "AI" showed up, and it doesn't care about silly things like "how high up the ladder you are", it just went "your skills about how to schedule, structure, plan, describe, and manage projects is the thing that matters. Those other skills are nice to haves, and will make you better at being a PM, but they're not the main focus anymore". It doesn't matter where on the ladder you are, that affects everyone.

Your grieving doesn’t have to shit all over my personal enjoyment and contentment. Me enjoying the use of AI in developing software doesn’t take anything away from your ability to grieve or dislike it. I’m not asking you to be excited, I’m asking you not to frame my enjoyment as naive, harmful, or lesser.

Your feelings are yours, mine are mine, and they can coexist just fine. The problem only shows up when your grief turns into value judgments about the people who feel differently.

If we've arrived at the point where bots are impersonating me (instead of the billions of other choices), I'm probably at peak Alex. I'll light a candle. So... easy to disambiguate this one.

I got the idea for Homeworld one night when I was about 21. At the time, I was working at EA as a programmer on Triple Play 98 (building FE gfx - not glamorous). In an RTS-ironic twist of fate, my boss and mentor at the time was Chris Taylor - go figure.

Friends of mine had their own game company and had boxed themselves into a technical corner they couldn't get out of, so I agreed to write a bunch of sprite conversion code for them after hours. That night, we were all working in a room, talking about the reasons X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter didn't work on a 2D screen (hold up and left till you turn inside and shoot) and how Battlestar Galactica didn't get the cred it deserved, and BOOM - in my mind I saw ships in 3D with trails behind them. Inside a crystal sphere like Ptolomy's theory of the universe (man inside - god outside), and I saw that the surface of a sphere is 2D, so you could orbit OUTSIDE with a mouse... it looked like spaghetti floating in zero g... that's why Homeworld's working title was "Spaghetti Ball" for months.

Fortunately for me, in this ambiguous thread, I can give you all the proof of life you want. Try me.

Now... is transparent and trustworthy casting spells? Yeah... it is, but not by itself. It's a primitive - a building block. My personal projects (that I do think are magical) kept running into the same problems. Effectively, "how do I give up the keys if I don't really know what the driver is going to do?" I tried coming at this problem 10 different ways, and they all ended up in the same place.

So I decided to go back to the basics - the putpixel(x,y) of agentic workflows, and that led me to transparency and trust. And now, the things I'm building feel magical AND sustainable. Fun. Fast... and getting faster. I love that.

At Relic, our internal design philosophy was "One Revolutionary and Multiple Evolutionary". The idea was that if you tried to do more than one mind-blowing new thing at a time, the game started feeling like work. You can see this in the evolution of design from Homeworld to DoW to CoH (and in IC too, but let's face it, that game had issues Now... on the topic of "Is agentic coding better or worse", I feel like that's asking "is coding in assembler better or worse". The answer (at least used to be) "it depends"... You're on a continuum, deciding between traditional engineering (tightly controlled and 100% knowable) and multi-agentic coding (1,000x more productive but taking a lot for granted). I've found meaning here by accepting that full-power multi-agentic harnesses (I rolled my own - it's fucking awesome) turn software engineering into Socratic debate and philosophy.

I don't think it's better. It's just different, and it lets you do different things.

SkyNet. When it can do the hard stuff, why do you think we'll still be around for project management and prompting? At that point, we are livestock.

Plagiarism is claiming someone else’s specific work as your own. Using a generative tool is closer to using a compiler, an IDE, or a library. I’m not copying a person’s code or submitting someone else’s project with the name filed off. I’m directing a system, reviewing the output, editing it, and taking responsibility for the result.

If I paste in a blog post verbatim and pretend I wrote it, that’s plagiarism. If I use a tool to generate a starting point and shape it into what I need, that’s just a different kind of authorship.