Today I was working through yet another post-later-than-middle-life crisis and it bothered me that we are going to lose one of the great traditions in all of human-centered programming—Hello World. Look at any blogging software (e.g. WordPress) and the first post is almost always some sort of Hellow World post. The first line of code you learn is usually something that will print one quite familiar line of code.

In the past month I have authored no less than four apps and one of which has already been outdated. Of those, exactly zero lines of lorem ipsum or the like have shown up, no dummy code or empty functions. All the routes have led somewhere there were supposed to1. And there's a reason for that: AI is gonna steal them peoples jobs.

I‘m sort of amazed that so much can be handled just through a command prompt, and sometimes a very crappy one. Kids these days won‘t know the joy of hunting down one extra space in 40,000 lines of code that takes 10 minutes to compile. Debugger, I hardly know her.

Yuk yuk.

But I digress.

Now, a few words and you can build an entire app in seconds. And by write, I mean, make a simple prompt and the AI build an entire app for you with little input. Really, I had a Fuzzy Clock app built in Xcode and all I said was something like ‘I wanna build a Fuzzy Clock app.’

Boom, roaster.

No sooner had I entered that prompt Google sent its little helper to build the whole darn thing. Since now the MacOS clock is virtually indestructible, I just said the heck with it. At least I can change it to an analog clock and forget it’s there.

But the point remains, the new generations are going to have to figure out what Hello World they are going to have.

  1. At least until they were orphaned because I really suck at coding. ↩