Are we destined to become civil war reenactors?
The other day a friend and colleague made a casual comment about how people who hand-write their own code are going to be like civil war reenactors in this AI era. I was struck by just how fitting this analogy is.
For those in non-US countries, civil war reenactors are people who get together at famous battlefields, don civil war era clothing, wield replica muskets, and reenact famous battles from the civil war.
NOTEHilariously, when I googled for that Wikipedia link, the AI companion told me that civil war reenactors recreate 1960s military life. This is obviously not when the American Civil War took place.
Reeneactors perform these battles for the historical value of it. Many do it because of the romance of the time period. Others do it simply for the comraderie that comes with the extensive preparation, rehearsal, and performance. Additionally, these reenactments are controversial and opinions about them are divisive. It’s a little eerie how apt this anology is to hand-writing code in the AI age.
In a time when syntax is a generated side-effect and a commodity means to an end rather than the end itself, writing our own code is a choice made to satisfy our own personal needs rather than an integral part of shipping features for our day job.
Reenactments are performed to remind people of what war was like in the “old days”, for better or worse. Historical education and keeping people from forgetting is one of the core goals. The same may be true for hand-rolling code. At some point it will feel like a lost art that only an esoteric few still practice, and they do so to keep history alive, not be cause their job requires it.
I’m already at a place where I write very little code by hand for my day job. I am a highly technical manager of highly technical agents. I give them work and I have their peers contribute to the review process and automation. I use even more agents on my team to ensure quality, benchmarks, and guard against regression.
The code I hand write these days is written for the pleasure of it. It’s written to remind me of the beauty and elegance of code that fewer people care about these days. It’s written to keep atrophy away from that part of my brain that thinks in code. I love educating other people about the beauty of programming languages and will never refuse an opportunity to go down memory lane and talk about the history of programming.
Am I a civil war reenactor? Am I seen as a somewhat weird (potentially crazy) person trying to keep alive a historical way of life that is no longer relevant?
There’s obviously controversy surrounding this kind of reenactment as well. Why would someone want to celebrate a battle won to preserve people’s “rights” to own slaves? I’m not saying that keeping manual programming alive is like supporting slavery. Rather, the views of the spectators are varied and strong. These perspectives can result in arguments, protests, and even the loss of friends.
I’ve seen people slam their desks and storm out of a meeting in defense of AI-generated code and I’ve seen just as many people lose their tempers defending the practice of coding by hand.
Will the ever-shrinking population of manual programmers get together every year, put on their black hoodies, light up their custom keyboards, and reenact long-dead manual coding practices?
What do you think? Will developers who manually write every line of code eventually go the way of the dodo, or is there a balancing point with room for both AI-written and hand written code in the same universe?
NOTEI hand-wrote this blog post without the assistance of AI. Am I doing this to keep the long-lost art of hand-written blogs alive?