My obituary for programming
Coding agents have ended the puzzle-solving joy that defined programming as a career
“Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the puzzle, the more you got paid. But even pretty simple puzzles were worth a lot of money because regular people just couldn't do it! No, they needed us. They would give us a problem and we would solve it the way we wanted. We set the strategy, we made the timeline, we defined what was and was not possible.”
Jeremy Scheff's essay mourns the loss of intrinsic satisfaction in programming as LLMs and coding agents absorb the puzzle-solving work that made the profession rewarding. Simon Willison frames the split: builders who care about shipping systems gain from LLMs, while those who valued the problem-solving journey itself face a genuine loss. This captures a growing sentiment in the developer community about the identity shift coding agents are forcing.