My obituary for programming

Simon Willison says Jeremy Scheff puts his finger on the part of programming that coding agents quietly take away: the joy of being paid to solve tricky little logic puzzles. For career programmers who liked the puzzle itself, that was the appeal. The harder the problem, the more the work felt like a reward.

There was also a kind of power in that old arrangement. Programmers could decide the strategy, set the timeline, and draw the line between what was possible and what wasn’t. Regular people couldn’t do the work themselves, so they brought the problem to someone who could make it happen.

Willison’s point is that LLMs are not a universal loss. If a programmer mostly wants to build working systems and doesn’t care much about the puzzle along the way, these tools are a gift. They make that kind of work easier and faster.

But if the real pleasure was directly solving the problems, the trade feels harsher. The job still exists, but one of its best parts has been hollowed out. That’s the obituary here: not for programming as a whole, but for a very specific kind of programmer happiness.