DHH said at Rails World that he has retired from being a professional programmer.

A lot of people heard a funeral. I heard a job description being rewritten.

Programming was never about writing code.

It was about solving a problem. The code was just the receipt.

That's the difference between a coder and a programmer. A coder turns a spec into syntax. Brackets, semicolons, the right method name from memory. A programmer decides what the spec should be in the first place. What to build. What to leave out. Where it will break at 2 a.m. and who gets paged.

The first job is dead. The model does it faster than any of us. The second job has never been more alive.

Think of Bob the Builder. Bob never dug a trench by hand. Scoop did the digging, Muck hauled the dirt, Dizzy mixed the cement. Bob's job was knowing what to build, which machine to send where, and what to fix when the plan met the ground.

Nobody ever said Bob wasn't a builder.

That's us now. The agents are the machines. One writes the migration, one writes the tests, one chases the bug. We're the one holding the plan.

So yes, the art of writing code by hand is dead. I won't pretend otherwise.

But the art of programming is very much on. The thinking, the trade-offs, the taste for what not to build. None of that got automated. It just got a thousand hands.

Coding is dead. Programming is on steroids.