Coding Is Evolving Into Something Else Entirely

The Paradox of the Ship

The Ship of Theseus poses a question we should all be asking ourselves right now. If you replace one piece of a ship, it's still the same ship. But what if you replace every piece, one by one, until nothing original remains? And what if you take all the replaced parts and build a new ship from them — which one is the original? It's a paradox about identity and change. And right now, it's the most accurate way to describe what's happening to coding.

Artificial Intelligence is evolving many verticals we have grown accustomed to over the years. It has applications in farming, business, biology, and more. Some skills in these domains are enhanced slowly, while others are enhanced at such a speed that it looks like something entirely new. Take precision agriculture, for example. Activities that used to be entirely dependent on physical labor — like irrigation, fertilization, and pest control — can now be done more effectively and with less human effort through sensors, drones, and computer vision, which monitor crop health, detect diseases, and optimize the flow of water and nutrients as never before. If the change has been so big in a non-digital activity like farming, it makes you wonder how fast and at what scale it can evolve a digital skill.

The Two Sides of Coding

One of these skills is coding. The art of coding is a complex activity composed of both creative and mechanical skills. There are different definitions for the concepts of implementation and design in software. For clarity, I'll call the mechanical side implementation, and the creative side design.

The implementation side involves learning a programming language with its syntax, rules, and structure, writing code repetitively, and going through extensive hours of debugging. The design side, on the other hand, is a much more abstract ability, not tied to any particular medium. It involves thinking of a solution, visualizing workflows, and planning execution. And here is the key idea: design is independent of the medium — and by medium I don't mean a programming language, but the act of mechanically writing code itself. That independence means the medium can evolve extensively, to the point it becomes something else entirely, while design not only survives the change, but grows more relevant because of it.

A Pattern as Old as Progress

Now, if you think about it, most human-made activities have an implementation side and a design side, and throughout history, we have been relentlessly optimizing the implementation. But here is what's interesting: every time we do, the ability to obtain the output gets democratized. Take food. For most of human history, if you wanted to eat well, you had to know how to hunt, grow, and cook. The implementation was inseparable from the outcome. But we optimized it. Step by step, from farming to supermarkets to restaurants to delivery, until today, anyone can eat a world-class meal without knowing how to cook at all. The design, the idea of what a great meal looks and tastes like, matters more than ever. The implementation, however, is almost invisible.

So why should it be different with coding? If you look back at the history of coding, you will notice a trend, the same trend I have been talking about in this essay: improvements to the point of evolution. It first started with binary numbers as the implementation side and human thinking as the design. Then, we had the desire (or need), to create greater things, and binary numbers were not enough anymore. So, what did we do? We improved the medium. That is how we got to machine language. But then, the same happened again. So, we moved to assembly language, then low-level compiled languages, then high-level programming languages, and now, we are at a point where the improvements to the medium will be so significant that it will evolve completely.

The Age of Production Agency

AI-assisted programming has given thousands of creative people around the world what I call production agency, the capacity to expedite the bringing of an idea to life. Artificial Intelligence has evolved coding so much that we can now build fully functional apps, websites, and games by inputting our design through a chat interface. The medium has gone from requiring us to mentally translate from idea to code and then type it mechanically, to simply communicating our thoughts in plain English through a chat interface, optimizing the entire process.

It is true that it is not perfect yet. It's true that AI can still make mistakes. It's true that we still need to figure many things out. But when has the inability to do something at a specific point in time ever meant it was impossible in the future? Da Vinci dreamed of the flying machine, and years later we got the airplane. Galileo observed the moon night after night in awe of its greatness, and years later Neil Armstrong walked on it. Protein folding was thought unsolvable, yet AlphaFold predicted the structure of over 200 million proteins. Everything is impossible, until it's done.

A New Ship

The ship we call coding is going through a change so fundamentally big that it is more of an evolution into something new. This new era reduces the technical barrier that implementation poses and gives more relevance to the design side. As implementation becomes more accessible, production agency increases, and with it, creativity, innovation, and growth.