The problem with the industrialisation analogy is that it ought to have already happened.
I'd already been coding from textbooks for a decade by the time my formal education included it, but that formal education began with VisualBasic.
Of all the apps I've been paid to work on, the only ones which you couldn't have done just fine in something like VB were the games, because they were performance limited.
Everything else, well, things like REST APIs and JSON are implementation details that don't fundamentally matter. The UI and UX team should have been able to plug in the relevant values for how to talk to the database like they set a Figma design's colour codes, without needing to care if those things meant a database was on-device or remote. Reactive UI and its bindings are *exactly* the kind of thing best done graphically rather than in code, even if you still need a database administrator for the database to work well.
The actual real hard stuff? Last time I was paid to actually make trade-offs to figure out optimisations I needed to make was 2012 or so. To the extent that one of my recent agentic coding experiments was to give myself such constraints once again (turns out you can find the travel time from any start location to all other locations in Berlin in 60ms in a web browser if you try).
The real work has become the politics of fashion, not of good code but of which framework and design pattern is in vogue.
The first compiler was written in 1952. Lisp has been around since 1958. We've been metaprogramming for a while already.
The difference between coding and woodwork is that programming a machine to do woodwork is not woodwork, but programming a machine to write code is still programming.
The problem with the industrialisation analogy is that it ought to have already happened.
I'd already been coding from textbooks for a decade by the time my formal education included it, but that formal education began with VisualBasic.
Of all the apps I've been paid to work on, the only ones which you couldn't have done just fine in something like VB were the games, because they were performance limited.
Everything else, well, things like REST APIs and JSON are implementation details that don't fundamentally matter. The UI and UX team should have been able to plug in the relevant values for how to talk to the database like they set a Figma design's colour codes, without needing to care if those things meant a database was on-device or remote. Reactive UI and its bindings are *exactly* the kind of thing best done graphically rather than in code, even if you still need a database administrator for the database to work well.
The actual real hard stuff? Last time I was paid to actually make trade-offs to figure out optimisations I needed to make was 2012 or so. To the extent that one of my recent agentic coding experiments was to give myself such constraints once again (turns out you can find the travel time from any start location to all other locations in Berlin in 60ms in a web browser if you try).
The real work has become the politics of fashion, not of good code but of which framework and design pattern is in vogue.
The first compiler was written in 1952. Lisp has been around since 1958. We've been metaprogramming for a while already.
The difference between coding and woodwork is that programming a machine to do woodwork is not woodwork, but programming a machine to write code is still programming.
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