00:00:00Today I woke up to an interesting post by Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Wurzel, about
00:00:06which I want to talk and also about the implications and my thoughts on the role of code and how
00:00:11important the actual code is, today and in the future.
00:00:16Now in this post Guillermo says "Code is an output, nature is healing.
00:00:21For too long we treated code as input.
00:00:23We glorified it, hand formatted it, prettified it, obsessed over it.
00:00:28We built sophisticated GUIs to write it in, IDEs.
00:00:31We syntax-highlit, tree-set, mini-mapped the code, keyboard-triggers, inline-autocompletes,
00:00:37ghost-text.
00:00:38What color scheme is that?
00:00:40We stayed up debating the ideal length of APIs and function bodies.
00:00:44Is this API going to look nice enough for another human to read?
00:00:48We're now turning our attention to the true inputs, requirements, specs, feedback, design
00:00:54inspiration, crucially production inputs.
00:00:58Our coding agents need to understand how your users are experiencing your application, what
00:01:04errors you're running into, and turn that into code.
00:01:07We will inevitably glorify code less as well as coders.
00:01:12The best engineers I've worked with always saw code as a means to an end anyway, an output
00:01:17that's bound to soon be transformed again."
00:01:20Wow, there's a lot in this post!
00:01:23Now I have a lot of thoughts about this.
00:01:27Now, obviously, and I think we can all see this, the entire role or the entire world of
00:01:35programming is changing rapidly.
00:01:38There's lots of stuff going on there and especially I and I guess many people in the industry can
00:01:46feel that since December it accelerated again with Opus 4.5 and Cloud Code and now also
00:01:53Codex and we got new models and new tools coming up almost every week.
00:01:58Things are changing quickly.
00:02:01And on a personal note, of course, I'm trying to keep up with that also regarding the content
00:02:06I create, regarding the courses I create and of course how I work, which is the foundation
00:02:10of that all, and that's why I released new courses on Cloud Code and Codex and I'm by
00:02:16the way running a big promotion right now where you can get my annual membership which gives
00:02:21you access to all the courses for a super low price.
00:02:24But it is having an impact on all of us.
00:02:27That is my point here.
00:02:28It's changing what we do, which content I create and of course how we build software.
00:02:35However, I'm not so sure if we really move away from the code and to me this post reads
00:02:42like code doesn't matter anymore and I think I disagree with that quite a bit.
00:02:50Now I will of course admit and obviously it's true that in the past, yes, we did obsess over
00:02:58API design, over naming of variables and functions, of the aesthetics of the code.
00:03:07And I would actually argue parts of this are still important today and very likely also
00:03:15in the future.
00:03:17Because even if the role of humans shifts away from writing the code towards reviewing it,
00:03:24what is easier to review, a messy codebase with 10,000 lines of codes that are partially
00:03:33redundant or unnecessarily complex with weirdly named or shaped functions or a clean codebase?
00:03:41What will be easier to review?
00:03:44And even if parts or even big parts of that review process shift towards machines and AI
00:03:50in the future, which of course is possible, even then I'm not convinced that the code quality
00:03:59does not matter at all anymore in that world.
00:04:02And if it's just that you're paying for all those tokens that are being generated and reviewed,
00:04:09if something can be built cleaner, it will very likely consume less tokens for both generating
00:04:17that code as well as for reviewing it.
00:04:19And token cost looks like it will be very, very important in the future because right
00:04:25now we're all on those subsidized plans by Enthropic, by OpenAI.
00:04:30We're not paying the real token cost, the $20 or $200 subscriptions you might have and
00:04:37I have.
00:04:39These are not subscriptions where those vendors necessarily make any money off.
00:04:44The true token cost is higher than that.
00:04:47And it's quite likely to go up in the future or what we pay to go up in the future when
00:04:54those companies need to earn money at some point.
00:04:57Obviously, maybe due to all the technical progress that will only start at a point where the token
00:05:02cost as a whole got down a bit, but we don't know that yet with certainty.
00:05:07We don't know how that market will look like in the future.
00:05:10And even if it would go down theoretically, of course, if companies can charge you a certain
00:05:16price, which may be substantially above the true price, well, they will happily take that
00:05:22margin.
00:05:23But yeah, that's a totally different topic.
00:05:25But tokens and token efficiency matters today and very likely also matters in the future.
00:05:31And that, of course, is related to code quality because in general, good code, clean code,
00:05:39is code that is not allowed to grow endlessly and become endlessly complex and complicated.
00:05:47Now, of course, there is an argument to be made that programmers in the past also sometimes
00:05:55had the tendency to write a bit too much code, maybe in certain points, to come up with a
00:06:02clean API and maybe some unnecessary abstractions, which they didn't really need at the point
00:06:08of time where they were implemented.
00:06:09We've probably all been there, where we've worked on a side project with zero users, and
00:06:15we decided that we want to implement our database access such that we could easily swap the database,
00:06:22even though we never intended to do that.
00:06:24And yeah, therefore, we wrote some adapter that was, of course, way more complex than
00:06:29it needed to be.
00:06:30We've all been there.
00:06:31And was it great?
00:06:32No, it was not, and it will not be today or in the future, no matter if that's code written
00:06:37by you or by AI.
00:06:39And right now, and that can, of course, change, but right now, in my experience, these AI models
00:06:45and tools like codecs, cloud code, they have a tendency to overcomplicate things, to introduce
00:06:54unnecessary complexity, to suggest changes that, yeah, really don't make a lot of sense
00:07:02that are unnecessarily complex, codecs especially right now has a tendency to never remove any
00:07:10code, just add more and more and more code and add fallback code and legacy handling.
00:07:15And you have to explicitly almost force it to delete code and to let go of old APIs.
00:07:22So that, of course, can all change, but these are things you have to fight about for today.
00:07:30And that is, of course, kind of what this post says doesn't matter anymore.
00:07:35But I say, yes, it does matter.
00:07:37You, as a developer, you have to take those fights and you have to care about the actual
00:07:43code and the code quality today and very likely also in the future.
00:07:49Obviously, nobody knows what the future holds, but it will always be important that you have
00:07:56a code base that doesn't grow unnecessarily complex for many reasons, token efficiency
00:08:01being one of them.
00:08:02Another reason, of course, and also the review part, by the way, another reason, of course,
00:08:08is that code, of course, has an impact on the performance of an application.
00:08:18Now, I'm not sharing any groundbreaking truth here or news, but of course, this is something
00:08:26that's easy to overlook.
00:08:28You could say that with AI generating code, the actual code doesn't matter too much anymore
00:08:34because it's easy to refactor, regenerate, replace.
00:08:38And that is all true if you ignore the token cost part again.
00:08:43But, of course, the code that's being generated has an impact or could have an impact on the
00:08:51performance of your application.
00:08:53There are multiple ways of querying a database.
00:08:56You could run nested queries or unnecessarily many queries because, hey, the result is the
00:09:03same.
00:09:04You got the data you need.
00:09:05Yeah, but a poorly optimized database query, of course, can show its true cost as soon as
00:09:12you do have a significant amount of users.
00:09:15The same, of course, is true for nested loops or all kinds of stuff that can creep into
00:09:20your code base that leads to worse performance.
00:09:23And that is why, of course, still the code quality matters and optimizing the code matters.
00:09:30You can definitely say that future AI models and tools will be very good at that and will
00:09:37be able to do that, that future models will be able to produce better code right from the
00:09:43start and also evaluate and then improve code.
00:09:47And that is absolutely possible.
00:09:50That still doesn't defeat my point that code quality matters, though, no matter if a future
00:09:55model generates it or you as a developer.
00:09:58Now, of course, what is the big difference is that in the world where the AI is able to
00:10:04do all of that, we humans are taken out of the loop.
00:10:08And I guess that is kind of the point Guillermo is making here.
00:10:13But of course, we don't know how exactly that future will look like.
00:10:16Now what I will say about this post is, and I get it, that is just how the internet is
00:10:23these days.
00:10:24You have to be provocative.
00:10:25You have to kind of be edgy so that people like me create a video about it.
00:10:30I totally get it.
00:10:31But of course, in this post, it sounds like all these things we did in the past were pretty
00:10:37stupid.
00:10:38Right?
00:10:39Building dedicated tools, GUIs that make it easier to write code, discuss API design.
00:10:45That's pretty stupid.
00:10:46Well, no, that shows that you care.
00:10:51And as a human, you want to care about your craft, about your work.
00:10:56That's like saying, oh, pretty stupid that designers used to first sketch on a piece
00:11:02of paper and then use dedicated software like Photoshop to turn this into actual digital
00:11:07art.
00:11:08No, that is not stupid.
00:11:10That is exactly what sets a human that cares about their craft and their job apart from
00:11:17someone who doesn't.
00:11:19And framing this as kind of stupid or weird or something that is gone for good is just
00:11:29a bad take.
00:11:30It's just not cool in any way.
00:11:32And of course now we're building new software, by the way.
00:11:36We're building new software for the agentic engineering world, something like the Codex
00:11:43app and all these AI agents and agent apps and GUIs we have these days.
00:11:49That's the new kind of software we're building and we'll keep on doing stuff like that.
00:11:54And we'll of course invent new ways to discuss about like how a properly written skill for
00:12:01agents should look like or how to set up a good agents MD file or whatever.
00:12:07We'll keep on discussing until we're totally out of the loop and we as humans don't need
00:12:14to do anything anymore.
00:12:16Which is a point I don't think will arrive and I certainly don't hope will arrive.
00:12:22But until that point, it's good to have opinions about the stuff you work on and to care about
00:12:29the stuff you work on.
00:12:31And I think that is really important.
00:12:33So yeah, I think code, the structure of the code, that will stay important.
00:12:41The only question is if the AI can do it all on its own and produce perfect code.
00:12:47And I don't know that and nobody can know right now.
00:12:50You can't look into the future.
00:12:53But in general, as a human, you should care about what you're doing.
00:12:57That is what sets the people that can be super successful and have fun at their work apart
00:13:03but from the people that don't, I think.